


Care and Feeding of Stray Physicists

by ArdeaWrites



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Calhoun is out to save the world, Cannon-Typical Violence, Emotional Intimacy, Gen, Half Life:Blue Shift, Male-Female Friendship, Mute Gordon Freeman, Short Chapters, Sign Language, Slice of Life, There's fluff too I promise, Workplace Violence, Worldbuilding, alien parasites and all that jazz, cannon-typical body horror, headcrabs, intentional friendship, introvert and extrovert friendships, lots of stray cat metaphors, mental health, one happy moment at a time, personal apocalypses, rebuilding yourself after the end of the world, small town life, the tags sound fluffier than this actually is it's still a half-life game writethrough, typical Black Mesa violence and nonsense
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:36:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 25,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25620697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArdeaWrites/pseuds/ArdeaWrites
Summary: Freeman's a brittle repressed loner with too much white around the eyes. New security guard Beth Calhoun picks him as the one most likely to snap and decides to avert that catastrophe before it starts. If there's one thing she's good at, it's holding the door open for people. For years, if necessary. For as long as it takes.Mucking around with a genderflipped Calhoun because media doesn't often let middle-aged women with guns be the proactive instigators of their own relationships.Chapters 1-6: Establishing characters & backgroundChapters 7- : Blue Shift write-throughRating bumped up for chapter 10 and beyond
Relationships: Freeman & Calhoun
Comments: 53
Kudos: 84





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Freeman tends to get paired with either the younger proactive Alyx or the older mature Barney. I wanted to see how making Calhoun female would, or wouldn't, change the dynamic of their post-timeskip relationship, and because middle-aged women in media seldom get the both the gun and the guy. This is not the same characterization for Freeman as Physics of the Crowbar but he's still a disaster. Lots of platonic fluff, haven't decided if this will evolve into intentionally romantic or stick to subtext. Still building up to the kind of woman who'd greet a man after twenty years with _About that beer..._

People always told her _“You don’t know when to quit.”_

She told them _“You don’t quit on people.”_ You don’t. Not when they push you away, not when they ignore you, vanish off the face of your social landscape, stop answering calls or texts.

You don’t give up on them.

“It’s like putting out food for a feral cat,” she explained once, leaning on the back deck railing while her mom flipped burgers and questioned why her friends were so strange. “Might take years of trying before they warm up, but you know they’re the ones starving worst. They don’t come right away because they don’t know how good it’ll be.”

“Maybe they really don’t want to come,” her mother had said.

“They do.” She’d smiled knowingly. Her social circle was several dozen isolated odd-balls strong, people who didn’t think they fit, didn’t know how to mesh, didn’t get invited to parties. She loved picking them out of the workday crowd and starting that process. Tossing treats. Building trust.

And the payoff was that moment she saw them smile, open up and relax, truly enjoy themselves. The wary stray starting to purr. A lot of her friends were friends with each other now, a little network of strangers who might only want social interaction three days a month, for whom three was a crowd, but she’d text and drive up and invite anyway, keeping that door open for them.

She had a schedule, a journal. Notes. People called her a bother. She’d been sworn at on bad days, and cried on on hard days, and laughed with on good days.

She was there for her friends.

And when she started the job at Black Mesa, she got excited. Lots of silent, scared feral cats in that place, lots of people who’d never had someone grab them out of grey monotony and offer them intentional fun.

\--

“I’m late, you understand. Not late yet, but I will be. I simply must get through. No, you move, sir, my work is unquestionably more important than yours!”

The scientist shoved his way through the security checkpoint and brushed aside her request for his badge. His passage dislodged another scientist’s armload of folders and the security desk’s lamp and the whole mess went sailing across the hall in his wake.

 _”Asshat,”_ she signed quick with her left hand, easily disguised as pushing her hair back, while she retrieved the lamp with her right. Signing her gossip was reflex born of twenty years of teasing and in-jokes between her and her brother. He was deaf and two years older than her, and had a painfully sharp wit that expressed itself in lightning-fast offhand sign.

Someone else had seen it though, and the green eyes behind the thick black-framed glasses bored into hers. _”Sorry!”_ She flashed at him, with a raised eyebrow, and debated winking.

Stray cat.

Skinny, wary stray cat.

He looked away.

He was taller than her by four inches and thinner than her by another four inches, and he was dressed in a white lab coat and had a badge color-coded for the anomalous materials lab, but he was new. He had that specific wide-eyed look of someone who wasn’t quite convinced the floor wouldn’t fall out from under them at any minute.

And since this was Black Mesa, it was a valid concern.

She’d been worried all her new coworkers would be too set in their ways for her tricks, but she’d cultivated a handful of security guards and had two interns in her orbit and was mentally scheduling the loud extrovert party on Friday night and the four one-on-one lunch dates for Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.

She had room for one more.

And that guy needed a friend. And food. And a good brushing. And maybe a flea collar.

She knew the look of someone who’d slunk their way through seven years of academia without an emotional connection to show for it, and she’d seen the aftermath of their spiral into despair.

She wasn’t going to let it happen again on her watch.

_You don’t quit on people. Not when they bite and scratch and swear at you, not when they slam the door the hundredth time, not when they refuse to answer a text for weeks on end. Because one day they’re going to need to know someone still wants them around, has been waiting for them. However long it takes._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Calhoun's got a mission and doesn't know Freeman isn't deaf.   
> Lunch break short.

"What do you know about that new guy, Anomalous Materials, came through my checkpoint looking like he's living on the tram?"

"Skinny one with the hair? Freeman. He's in HEV too with the ladies. Why?" Richards hung up his vest and rebelted his holster.

"He deaf?"

"Dunno. Never heard him talk though, now that you mention it."

"Huh." Calhoun paused cleaning her sidearm. "Does he usually come through your checkpoint? I saw him first time yesterday."

"Yeah, but if he was going to HEV before Anom, he'd go through you and take the shortcut through the old cafeteria."

"Brave guy."

"He's in Anom. Nothing scares them."

True enough. She finished her gun-cleaning, reassembled the gun and put the kit away. The informal Janitors' Closet Poker Night started in fifteen minutes. She had time. "You coming tonight?" she asked.

Richards shook his head. "Gotta go solve a coyote problem." He winked.

She laughed. "Have fun. Don't shoot the tourists." 'Coyote problem' was security-guard speak for 'going into town to buy beer and get drunk with firearms.'

  
\---  


She took the guards' lift to the Robotics checkpoint, trotted down the hall to the mezzanine above the decommissioned tram station for the old biological hazard lab, jumped the rail, climbed down the ridiculously old soda machine that still sat there, and let herself out by the security door. The old cafeteria had been rendered obsolete with a tram rerouting but it made a convenient pass-through between Robotics and Anom, provided, of course, one wasn't afraid of an eerily-lit empty space that now collected unused laboratory equipment, leftover cafeteria detritus and an incomprehensible collection of broken toasters.

Sure enough, the dust was plenty disturbed. Someone had been making frequent use of the shortcut. Smart guy, to have found this place so quickly. And there he was. He was moving briskly, long legs carrying him through the maze with an efficiency she envied.

She didn't know if he was hearing and she didn't want to startle a guy in what could have passed for a haunted house. She also wanted to maintain the facade of another chance encounter. Time for a little harmless deception.

She palmed the pack of cards she was carrying, tripped over a toaster, tried to catch herself on a broken-legged table, failed, and sent the stack of cards flying across his path.

He stepped nimbly over them, stopped and turned to stare at her. She'd made a good crash and earned a very real bruise on her forearm, but she'd made first contact. _"Hey,"_ she signed from the floor, feeling just about as sheepish as if the fall hadn’t been staged. _"I'm so sorry, can you grab those for me? Poker night."_

He knelt to collect the cards nearest him while she scraped up the rest. Once her hands were free again, she signed _"Open game, we're playing for snacks. Want to come?"_

He shook his head, stood and walked away.

Well, it’d been a good try.

She got up, dusted off her uniform knees, boxed the cards and went to poker night.

  
\---  


To be fair, not all of their encounters were staged. She kept loose tabs on him over the next few weeks, until Richards started joking about her slipping a GPS tracker into his pocket. “Why him? He ain’t cute.”

“That’s not what this is about,” she retorted. She was frustrated. Yesterday’s lunch date hadn’t showed up, and had called out sick today, but hadn’t texted Calhoun. The gal always texted. She dropped out of their informal lunch get-togethers more than half the time, but she _always_ texted. And last week she’d mentioned her ex had called her dad and they’d fought, and since both dad and ex had restraining orders and lived within an easy drive of both each other and her, she’d been on edge.

And now Calhoun was on edge, and she was trying not to let it interfere with everything else.

She texted Macy _Hey you doing alright? Heard you were out sick; let me know if you need anything, I can drop it off on my way home._ Hopefully that didn’t insinuate too much obligation to respond. Maybe Macy really was just under the weather.

She snapped her phone shut. “I’m worried about that guy, Richards. He isn’t connecting.”

“Not everyone does.” Richards chased shredded lettuce around his lunch tray. “White coats less than most.”

“Doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try.”

“What’s in it for you?”

She stared at him, debated telling the truth, and decided against it. “I don’t like seeing people unhappy.” It wasn’t a lie; she really did not like seeing people unhappy.

She’d been told she ought to become a psychologist or a counselor but she didn’t like the restriction of a one-hour one-room relationship. She wanted to be out helping people in real life, not locked in a closet somewhere hoping they’d show up. Police officer, EMT, nurse, firefighter, all the various public service jobs were on the possibility list and she still wasn’t where she wanted to be, but Black Mesa Security Guard wasn’t a bad spot to start. Her two years of communications and pre-psych were shockingly applicable and the firearms and combat training was a lot of fun.

And she was making a difference. At least with her poker regulars and the handful of folks who met for lunch, and the guys from her security rotation who picked her folks’ patio in town to get drunk on, instead of the shooting range out in the desert.

She’d replaced a man whose death had been ruled accidental. Richards was still lying to her about what’d gone down that night. She knew eight people went 'coyote hunting' and only seven people came back, and no one wanted to talk about it.

It was rare, in Black Mesa terms, but it happened more often than she liked. Macy never texted her back. Never showed up for work again. Calhoun watched the news, chatted with the local off-Mesa EMT squad, and finally dragged the truth out of a tired firefighter two weeks later. Domestic dispute. Collateral damage. Work-issue firearm recovered at the scene.

So when Freeman arrived late, tie crooked, black under his eyes, she had his preferred style of coffee ready. She handed him the lidded paper cup as she scanned his badge and signed, as he looked at her in confusion, _“It’s fresh, you look like you need it more than I do.”_

He’d nodded a quick thanks and kept moving. And then he’d glanced back at her, still confused, but drinking the coffee.


	3. Chapter 3

Freeman wasn't in her orbit yet but not for lack of trying. She had to balance the desire to befriend him with the perception of flirting, and dealt with the locker-room comments of the seven men on her security rotation. She thought she'd left that kind of behavior behind in middle school but apparently not. "He's not my boyfriend," she said, again.

James chuckled and banged his locker shut. "Keep telling yourself that, sweetheart."

"Call me sweetheart once more and I'll break your hand," she hollered at his retreating back. She could, too. All the men in the room had a few inches on her but she matched them in core weight and knew how to use her lower center of gravity to her advantage. The Mesa liked its guards in reasonable condition to defend themselves and she'd passed their physical fitness and hand-to-hand defense exams just fine. And she was _good_ with a revolver.

But somehow the imaginary love life they'd constructed between her and Freeman still dominated the locker room conversation. She had to be fair to them though; their imagination wasn't original, but it was probably all they had.

"We still on for Friday?" she asked Richards.

"Yeah," he said. He ran his hand through his hair and looked over her head, distracted. "Yeah. We'll be there. I'll bring the guys around about seven."

"Alright," she said. "I'll see you all then."

Most of the guards and employees lived on the Mesa, and she had a bunk in a shared dorm with four other female security guards on different rotations, but anyone with a local connection in town tended to leverage it to get off Mesa as often as possible. 'Town' was two thousand people in a desert sprawl of single-story mobile homes and prefabs, with the odd old brick or daub house between them, half off the grid because no one ever built a grid, but it was Town. And it had better beer and a lot more character than anything the Mesa guards' cafeteria could scrape up. Her parents owned what had been intended as a snow-bird house on the outskirts, built fifty years prior and in bad need of paint, but it had a shady deck and a fire pit. Her step-dad had served his time in a uniform and liked hanging out with the guards she brought around and they in turn thought the world of the old guy and his wealth of ridiculous stories. She'd successfully weaned her rotation off 'coyote hunting' and onto her mom's homemade salsa and meat balls, and so far it was going well.

Freeman, on the other hand, was a tough case. She'd tamed desert-born tomcats with more ease.

He'd started accepting coffee. She offered rarely, just when he looked like he really needed it, and because she didn't want him thinking she'd honestly gotten it for him. Like tossing treats with your back turned, waiting for the cat to creep up. But while he'd take the coffee, he'd barely make eye contact and never accepted any of her offhand invites. He still looked too disheveled for a man who lived on the Mesa so she had a chat with a few people and got a line on someone who knew his situation.

\---

"Does he live here for real? Because he's pulling a great 'hermit savant' look right now," she said, over her cards, to Amber, who scheduled housing for his block.

Amber looked at her cards and raised her eyebrows. "Hold. And yeah, I mean I have him on Housing in room six, level two, west quad, all that, but after I give 'em the key it's up to them to actually live in the place, you know. They're still half grad student, they don't know how to feed and wash themselves yet."

"Draw one." Tammy, across the table and in charge of the housekeeping staff, took her card and snorted. "You're talking about the tall kid, right? One who doesn't talk? Yeah, he lives there, but he's in with this guy Randal and let's just say I wouldn't blame your boy if he'd been sleeping on the roof."

"Oh?" Calhoun was intrigued.

"Yeah. My gals who clean that floor says this Randal's a bit off the edge himself, likes his music loud and his ladies louder. He's somebody's protege up in Liability, 'can't do no wrong 'till someone sues your daddy,' that kind."

Amber made a noise of agreement. "I wouldn't have your boy in there except we're short on housing with all this rotation going on in Lambda. They're bringing in new folks by the bucket-load faster than we can house them, and they double-bunk 'em for a week, fire half, and start over. They're running through people so fast I can't even get the keys back."

Well that was interesting information, Calhoun thought. She bit back the reflexive "he's not my boy." Maybe he was, in true feline fashion, trying very hard to ignore, avoid and escape. In her experience it took more effort to do the latter than to just sit the problem down and lay some ground rules.

She traded a night duty with one of her roommates and manned the tram station for the West Quad dormitory a few days later. Half the building was underground while the other half jutted out into open air, three stories of blank grey cement with little energy-saving windows like portals to the outside world. Sure enough, he got off at the station and went in. After her shift she walked through the building, her uniform rendering her invisible to the intellectuals. The door of Freeman's room vibrated with sound. Somehow she doubted he was in there. She still didn't know if he was hearing but she suspected he was, and even if he wasn't, didn't mean he wanted his teeth joggled out by someone else's base.

So she went for a walk. The desert was scorching hot by day but cold, dark and calm by night. If she'd been expected to live here, her closest next-best option would be, as Tammy had said, the roof. She found a ladder out of her reach but by her estimation, well within Freeman's. So she found a box, then found a sturdier box, and climbed up.

And there he was, sitting in a folding chair with his feet on a milk crate, with a camp lantern, a stack of paperwork and a cold drink. He looked up as she got herself over the roof's edge and had a very solid glare on by the time she got close. She felt a little silly; clearly the man had found his sanctuary and here she came, an uninvited intrusion.

She started signing an apology and explanation but then realized he probably couldn't see her well enough in the dark. She shrugged and said aloud over her signs, "Sorry sir, got a report of someone up here. Just checking it out!"

_"Is there a problem?"_ he signed, his motions curt.

"No, no problem at all. You're fine to be up here, just don't tell OSHA."

He looked in her general direction for a long second, then went back to his papers.

Alright, she could take a hint. She climbed back down the ladder. He was probably staying on the roof until his roommate went to bed, whatever hour that was, and getting back out of the room before the guy woke up. Not a great balance, not a viable long-term living situation. No wonder he was struggling with sleep and basic personal care.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently after Crowbar I am starved for writing character interaction.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I made Calhoun a little backstory. 
> 
> I too live in a tiny desert town where it's presently 95 outside. Sitting inside in the AC and writing is much preferred to doing absolutely anything else right now.

Friday night did not go well.

Friday night went very badly indeed.

She called Richards Saturday afternoon, after she'd gotten the back deck cleaned up. He picked up the phone but wouldn't talk to her. She could imagine him sitting on the floor of his guards' bunkroom, all the windows closed and blinds drawn. She didn't know how to get to him or what she should do. She called James. He swore at her but he said he'd call her if there was any change with Cohen, and said thanks for the call before he hung up.

\---

On Monday, she covered for Cohen, got a roommate to take Richards’ shift, and was awkwardly ignored by the other five men. By dumb chance she ended up on the same tram as Freeman, heading out of the labs and into the residential buildings that night. The rest of the passengers filtered out from stop to stop until it was just the two of them. She was pacing, up and down the length of the tram. She knew it bothered him and for his sake wished she could hold herself still but it just wasn't happening. Her predecessor's ghost was riding Richards hard and much as she wished she could step in, he'd firmly walled her out.

What had gone down in the desert, on paper, was an accident. The people present, most of them local guys and not the urban post-cops the Mesa brought in for the majority of its force, were not talking. Local guards like her rotation manned checkpoints, walked the perimeter, stood watch in the brutal desert heat, chased jackrabbits out of the culvert pipes and took up any other boring gritty dusty slack the indoor-only 'professionals' didn't want to handle. But their camaraderie didn't explain the code of silence surrounding the incident that had killed Fredrickson, the man she'd replaced.

And while 'drunk firearms accident' was a horrible tragedy, it also didn't explain the lack of closure, the twitchy-eyed side glances they gave one another whenever his name was mentioned, the way the seven men repeated each other's story like a mantra. And it was tearing them apart.

She didn't know how to get through to Richards, the one she was closest to. Her classes never covered "belligerent 46-year-old functional alcoholic with a dark secret."

Freeman glanced from his papers to her, brows knit and knee twitching, his face a clear message of _settle down._

Her mind was running in circles and she was getting nowhere. She stopped pacing and made herself sign to transfer that energy from her feet to her hands. _"I'm sorry, I know I'm bothering you. I'm concerned about Richards, the guard at the Anom checkpoint. He's going through something right now and I don't know how to help him,"_ She signed, as both an explanation and an invitation to engage. Some men liked to fix things. Maybe Freeman would have an idea.

_"What makes it your problem?"_ He signed.

Alright, that was brutally direct. _"He's my coworker. I spend ten hours a day with the man and I have to trust him at my back with a gun."_

_"Tell HR,"_ Freeman signed.

_"No, they'll just fire him."_

_"He's not your responsibility,"_ he signed. He looked at her, narrow-eyed, jaw hard, and looked away. _"Neither am I."_

_"I decide who is and isn't my responsibility,"_ she signed back but he wasn’t looking. She was angry now. "You want to talk responsibility, alright, let's talk. Look at me." She snapped her fingers, a rude gesture but it got his attention. _"I'm not doing this because I'm some bleeding-heart with rescuer delusions, I'm doing this because someone didn't, and people died. Guy at my dad's work, got stressed, lost connection, started drinking. His wife cheated on him and left him, and then he got fired. You know what he did? Showed up with a shotgun. Shot the place up, blew his own head off. My dad's dead because some guy somewhere had a bad day and thought no one cared. So he had another bad day, and another one, and then he decided to call it quits. And yeah, people need space and respect and all that but you know what, my friends, my responsibility. I don't want me and them dead because you have a bad day, and I don't want you dead, friend, because someone else has a bad day. So yeah, forgive me if I'd rather buy you coffee then decide between shooting you and getting shot by you."_ She dropped her arms. Hard emotion always somehow ended up in sign, not voice; side-effects of learning it alongside a sibling, she supposed.

He looked down at his hands. _"I'm sorry,"_ he signed.

"Yeah, me too," she said aloud. "For what it's worth, you're not a project, you're just a guy I see every day and if it was my brother sleeping on a rooftop I'd sure want someone to give him a cup of coffee now and then. And you are still invited to poker night. Or to get-drunk-at-my-mom's-house-night. Whichever works."

He raised an eyebrow.

She waved it off and signed _"Security guard thing."_ Aloud she said "Richards' a nice guy. Usually pretty chill, doesn't drink too much, you know, manages himself. But Cohen got drunk on Friday, like really plastered, hospital-drunk, and he started talking about having nightmares about Fredrickson. Freeman, those guys went dead silent. They got real scared. And Richards hasn't been alright since then. He also maybe hasn't been sober since then. He's not coming in to work, he's not answering my calls or anyone's. And you know, it's bad enough what officially happened, but Cohen said something that got them. He said he's been 'hearing it following him, seeing it around,' like something's haunting him. I know us locals can get a little odd around the edges to you types, but this is beyond that. These are solid men, people Black Mesa trusts to guard its secrets, and something's got them seriously spooked."

Freeman was curious now. She sighed, seeing his gaze narrow in thought. Trust her worst day in years to finally bridge the gap between them. _"What else did he say?"_ he asked.

"Not much, they shut him up quick. But he said he couldn't get the screams out of his head, they shouldn't have 'taken it,' they'd done Fredrickson in, should have tried harder, things like that. He was raving by the end of it. But he kept saying he was 'seeing it around' and 'could hear it in the vents.' And none of them contradicted him. Richards went white and wouldn’t speak the rest of the night. James and I took Cohen to the ER and when we got back everyone else was gone."

Freeman was still for a long few minutes, as the tram curved around its track through the rocky tunnel. _"Have you seen or heard anything?"_ he asked.

_"No,"_ she signed. And noticed his word choice. He'd leapt straight over 'bad trip' and 'delusional' to 'substantiate the observation.' That was interesting. "Do you know what this is about?" she asked.

He shook his head. _"Not directly, no, but... it's Black Mesa."_

“Yeah, yeah it is.”

They got to his stop. She was so far past her stop she’d have to ride the tram back around another twenty minutes, but she didn’t care.

He got off, stopped and turned back. He signed around the papers in his arms. _“Thanks for the coffee.”_

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's always ok to critique how I'm presenting sign language here! I am around translators occasionally for work but don't directly interact with Deaf community or folks who use sign as primary communication. I'm basing Calhoun's flip-flopping between speech and sign off the translators I've watched who use both in conversation with one another and with their kids.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things go wrong with shotguns and small towns never change. Also hey a normal-length chapter!

“It’s in there. It’s in there! I can hear those tiny claws!” Cohen was backed in a corner, his shotgun trained on the HVAC vent above. “It won’t get me. I know what it wants. It’s not gonna get me. Not this time.”

Calhoun knelt on the floor near him. Her heart raced wildly, every instinct telling her to dive under the desk and stay there until it was over. But she refused that instinct; she wasn’t going to let someone else die on her watch.

Her hands were empty and spread wide in front of her, where he could see them. Getting down also meant she was under the shotgun’s splatter angle and less likely to lose her face. _Come on,_ she thought. _Please look at me. We can get through this. Doesn’t have to be this way._ She tried to focus on Cohen and not the big black gun in his hands. This wasn’t going to be like last time.

Everything had started fine. Cohen had been back at work for a few days, seemed like he was doing alright. Richards was back too. They were all speaking again. No one mentioned the incident and she’d decided to tactfully take a few weeks’ break before the next Friday night party.

But something had set Cohen off. She didn’t know what, or why, or exactly when, but Richards had called her in a panic and begged her to go down to the Robotics security office and get him, before HR found out. She’d arrived to find him a complete mess, gun up, yelling at things she couldn’t see.

“Cohen, it’s me. It’s just me,” she said. “I’m right here. Can you look at me?”

His eyes flickered over her, unseeing. “It’s coming,” he hissed.

“Cohen, what is coming? I can’t see it. Can you describe it to me?”

“It’s little. It’s round. It’s fast, it’s got these claws…” he trailed off with a gurgle.

Someone pounded on the office door. “Not now!” she called, then caught a flash of rust-colored hazard suit. Great, one of the roboticists had found them. She motioned frantically for the scientist to get back but it was too late.

“What’s going on in here?” The scientist demanded, then dropped in the doorway as she saw the gun.

Cohen screamed and pulled the trigger. The scientist was on the floor, her hands over her head, and behind her Calhoun saw orange.

Freeman, in his own hazard suit, wobbled against the door jam and slid down it, leaving a streak of red.

Calhoun’s chest constricted and her ears rang painfully. Freeman’s face and head seemed alright, he was looking around as if trying to find the source of the blast, but he didn’t seem able to coordinate his hands. One clamped over the left ear, and the other was instinctively reaching for the fracture in his armor, high on the left side of his chest. The shotgun blast had mostly gone between his arm and body and out into the hall but a fair amount of buckshot had torn through the armor and into skin.

The scientist got up, swore, and tore the gun out of Cohen’s hands.

“Wait! Stop, hold up,” Calhoun yelled as she clamped her hands over the torn armor under Freeman’s arm. His blood was warm on her fingers. “He’s having an episode, he isn’t a danger.”

“He just shot Doctor Freeman. I think I’d classify that as a danger.”

“You’ve disarmed him, Doctor. Please just let him be. I’ll take him to Medical, if you’ll take Doctor Freeman.”

The scientist regarded Cohen for a long moment, then nodded. “If you want him, he’s all yours.”

Then Cohen groaned and whispered “It ate his head. It… it ate his whole _head_.”

Calhoun’s heart sank. The scientist crouched in front of Cohen. “What did you see?” she asked.

“I saw it. It took Fredrickson. Made him hop around!” he laughed a manic laugh. “And then we killed it, but we killed him too, because it was him. And now it’s hunting us. All of us!”

The scientist swore again. “Change of plan. I’m taking this guy with me. I don’t know what he’s got in his system but he needs help. Can you manage Doctor Freeman?”

Calhoun nodded. “Where are you taking Cohen?”

“To the Robotics medical station. You can pick him up there later.”

Alright, Calhoun thought, we’ll do just that. She had noted the change in the scientist’s demeanor the moment Cohen started describing his haunting, or whatever it was. That scientist knew what Cohen was talking about. She looked at Freeman. Did he know?

He ought to have been making noises. People, even when they caught a glancing blow with a shotgun, tended to make noises, inadvertent ones as they tried to find a less painful way to breathe, even if they didn’t speak or cry out. But he wasn’t. He was shaking his head, rubbing his ear, and keeping his arm clamped over her hands to add to the pressure. She couldn’t radio for assistance this way, not with both hands occupied. And he couldn’t sign.

“Hey, can you hear me?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Alright. Look at me, steady.” Green eyes, behind those ridiculously thick glasses, locked on hers, glazed and wide. “Good. Any blurred vision? A little? Ok. How much pain are you in? Use your right hand, low for low, raise it for high.” She ran through the general assessment she’d been taught. The armor would have protected him from the worst of the blast, but surface trauma was still plenty painful and a nice source of blood loss.

“Ok. Can you stand? Count of three.” She got him up without releasing pressure but it was going to be incredibly awkward to move through Black Mesa this way. She maneuvered him to the security office desk and got him sitting on it, then lifted her hands off for a quick moment to snag the medical kit. She packed the wound with all the gauze it had in it. “Hold that right there, tight as you can, and don’t move,” she told him.

Now she had her hands free.

They were red and sticky with his blood. She sighed and grabbed her radio to call for assistance, but stopped when she saw his face.

 _No,_ he signed.

“You need medical attention,” she said.

He winced, trying to get both hands up without dislodging the gauze. _Patch it. I’ll be fine._

Her jaw clenched. If he was refusing medical treatment for something as absurd as an accidental shotgun blast, what was he hiding?

“You are not going to be fine, but if that’s how you want to play this, we’re going to get to know each other a whole lot better real quick. Because you are not permitted to go wandering around bleeding like a sieve inside your armor.”

He nodded. He looked tired, she thought. More tired than he ought to have. She checked her watch. It was end of his work day, just about, and if he was in Robotics today and suited up, that probably meant stress-testing the powered armor. Which meant pushing him as far as he’d go, from what she’d heard about the hazard course.

She didn’t like this.

“Alright, I’m going to get that chest plate off and see how extensive the damage is. I’m forewarning you, I have an expired EMT license and that’s it. If I get this thing off and decide it’s not safe for me to mess with, then you can protest all you like but I’m calling in real help. Got it?”

He nodded, so she went to work on the buckles and latches holding everything together. She got the shoulder piece off and the chest plating front and back off, and then pulled down the heavy woven layer under that. It was like peeling a wet suit, the bandage scissors in the kit didn’t want to cut through it, but she got it down far enough to get under his arm.

He’d lost more skin than she thought. And the shotgun blast wasn’t the only of his worries. She could see the outline of the armor in the contusions on his chest and shoulder, and she betted if she kept going she’d find them all over. Rusty pinpricks of oxidized blood under the skin and layers of dark bruising from fresh purple to faded yellow mottled across his collarbone and sternum. She smelled a musty old-oil smell coming off the suit in addition to the day’s accumulation of sweat on him and she really didn’t like the look of the injection mark and ring of bruising on his neck. Or the way he’d stopped flinching as she manipulated his arm. Morphine, probably, and built into the suit. She wondered if the drugging was automatic or if he had any control over the delivery system.

“They trying to get a ten-year contract’s worth out of you all at once?” she said, to fill the silence. He didn’t answer. He was leaning against the wall, eyes closed. Probably for the best. She got his arm up, got the gauze off and found the bleeding had slowed to an ooze. The damage was surface-level, he’d lucked out not losing a chunk of rib, but the torn skin and tissue covered a patch the size of her hand. He’d scar very badly and would need real stitching and it was very clear this was beyond her band-aid skill level. “Hey,” she said, gently, and got her hand under his jaw. “You doing alright? Don’t pass out on me. If you don’t want Mesa Medical to see the whole package, I can take you into town but we gotta go now.”

He nodded. She taped the wound, got the armor back on over it, and hobbled him down to the Robotics locker room, where she got to know him a whole lot better helping him get out of the suit and into regular clothing. And yes, the contusions did go all the way down. He was shivering by the time she got him into the slacks and button-down, as much from the day’s usual work as from the shotgun blast, she figured. Thankfully the locker room was cleared out for the night. She texted Richards and told him Cohen was at Robotics Medical and she was off for the evening; he didn’t need to know the rest.

Driving Freeman into town in the middle of the night was oddly surreal. She’d been wanting to get to know him better, but this was very, very far from how she’d imagined that going. She texted her mom _taking a cat to the vet, call you tomorrow_ by way of explanation, should someone see her and ask. Small town contingency plans.

\---

The ER doc raised his eyebrows. “Coyote hunting,” Calhoun explained.

The man just shook his head and ushered Freeman onto a bed. “Calhoun, I have known you too long for this.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“He’s not responding the way I’d expect him to. He had anything for the pain?”

“Uh, someone else gave him what they said was morphine,” she said. White lies.

The doc paused his exploration of the gauze. “That isn’t the usual party drug for a coyote hunt.”

She shrugged. “I’m just on cleanup duty, I don’t know what went down.”

“Well, thanks for not dumping him on the doorstep then.”

The doc also raised eyebrows at the bruising, and the contusions, and looked pointedly at the injection mark, until Calhoun finally leaned over Freeman’s bloody upper half and stared the doc in the eye and said, her voice low and as cold as she could make it, “Do the job I’m paying you for, Martin, and nothing else. Coyote hunt. Local guy. You don’t know what he’s into and neither do I and the Mesa is never, ever going to hear about it. Understand?”

He gave her an utterly deadpan look. “Calhoun, I go to church with your mother. The Mesa won’t hear about it from me, and neither will she. Just please promise me you two are using protection.”

She wanted to strangle him, but she still needed him to get the buckshot out.

By sunrise, he’d pulled a dozen pellets out of Freeman’s chest and arm, stitched what there was to stitch and taped up the rest over clean gauze. It would scab, itch and scar, but unless he really tore at it it ought to heal alright. The morphine had worn off enough for Freeman to be alert and clearly in pain, by how he was moving and breathing, but the doc wouldn’t give him anything further. “I don’t know what he’s had in his system or at what dose. Pain is safer than medication,” he said. “And maybe after this you’ll both think twice about coyote hunting.”

\---

She drove him back to Mesa, listening to his breathing. Wounded cats didn’t make noise, they withdrew. Tucked in their limbs and held themselves still and waited for the worst to pass. Sometimes the only sign was the narrowed eyes and the shallow breathing. She got him back to his dorm just after the morning commute, so it was blessedly empty of his roommate. “You going to be alright?” she asked, as he wobbled in under his own steam. She wrote her number on a piece of paper and handed it to him. “Let me know if you need anything.”

He signed _”Yeah,”_ but she didn’t entirely believe it.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Short bit bridging into What Happens Next, shamelessly fluffy before the big fall.  
> (Freeman ponytail sighting confirmed)

  
  


Her rotation, except for her, was unsurprisingly fired the next day. Cohen had told the Mesa everything. There'd been theft of company property and something had gone wrong with an experimental substance. The official story didn't change: it was still a "drunk firearms accident" as far as the one and a half police officers in town were concerned, and if the Mesa wasn't pressing additional charges then they didn't want to hear about it. Calhoun suspected that confession had come with some chemical help, but she kept her mouth shut and threw them all a party. A big one, because “got fired from Black Mesa” was a prerequisite for nearly every other job in town and she didn’t want them thinking they were banned from the back deck over something like a little mental breakdown.

She and Cohen had a chat, and then Cohen and her step-dad had a chat, and after that he perked up a bit and got contact information for a therapist one town over, where no one would bother him for going.

And when the summer meteor shower hit, she went one night with all her town friends, a second night with a group from work that hadn’t yet been initiated into the splendor that was the desert night sky, and the third night she invited Freeman, alone.

She was floored when he accepted. He'd been declining everything she offered for weeks, and she'd wondered if the incident with the shotgun and its aftermath of undressings and ERs had irreparably divided them.

He’d healed more or less, to an outside observer, but she’d been watching him walk past her checkpoint and knew he was still favoring his left side. She knew when he’d been in Robotics because of how his hands trembled and the dry sweat in his hair, and when he’d been drugged because of how his eyes glazed and slid off her. On good days, she got a nod and the barest twitch of a smile from under his goatee, and on bad days, he hurried by without making acknowledgement, head down, ponytail greasy and tangled.

But he’d accepted the invite, so she hauled two folding camp chairs, a couple blankets and a cooler out, picked him up at the back employee parking lot and drove an hour to nowhere where the low cliffs blocked the Mesa’s ridiculous spotlights.

There were a couple other groups out, she could hear the hollering and the slightly drunken singing and recognized some of the singers, and while part of her would have loved to join them, that wasn’t Freeman’s kind of party.

Apparently, this was. Just a chair in the dark and the whole arc of the Milky Way above, and the splattering of shooting stars from the meteor shower, with the odd occasional satellite like an ignorant trespasser between them. It was easy to imagine a million more worlds, she thought, when you stared up at the infinity of space and considered just this galaxy, then all the others beyond it, going on forever. Not so hard to believe Earth wasn’t alone; the feeling was comforting, she thought. An infinite number of friends you just hadn’t met yet.

She didn’t say it all aloud, because she was biting her tongue out of respect for his inability to reply in the dark, but then his knuckles brushed hers and he found her hand and drew it up to sign against her palm.

The cat asking for attention, the first time it initiated contact. Stuffing it in a crate and hauling it to a vet for emergency aid didn’t count, and some cats resented the intrusion, even if it was life-saving, and never warmed up again, but this one… this one understood. He’d forgiven her, gotten over the awkwardness of knowing she'd helped him get his pants on and seen him at his least competent.

She wasn’t as good with palm signing as with two-handed and it was slow, spelling out every word, but she got the gist. He was explaining something about his research, about how resonant crystals could let humanity bridge an infinite distance with communication.

So she told him about how she hoped they’d find aliens that way, and they talked probabilities of habitable worlds and theorized about biological limitations on intelligence until she’d gotten his hair tie off and was finger-combing the tangles out. His hair was a good six inches longer than hers but she wasn’t convinced he owned a brush or shampoo.

She moved her hand down, until her knuckles were gently kneading into the back of his neck, where muscles ran tight and taunt over bone. She felt the degrees by which he relaxed and judged her progress by the way his fingers twitched on her leg, where he’d been signing.

When his breath hitched a little and he put his head back into her fingers, she knew she’d found his purr.

Eventually the moon came up and blotted out the stars, and they packed up by its light and drove home.

\---

The next day, her new rotation partner Johnson sent her on an errand to retrieve a scientist’s keys that had gotten left on the wrong side of a door at a decommission tram station. Exactly the sort of nonsense she expected from both her new rotation and of the absent-minded whitecoats.

And when the door lock malfunctioned and locked her out on the tram platform, she rolled her eyes and banged on the door to be let back in. The tram came around the bend and she spotted Freeman in it, riding alone, because he was late for work, because they’d stayed up half the night being idiots. So she yelled for him to tell the guys at the checkpoint she was locked out, and if they thought it was funny then it was game on and HR be hanged, she’d prank them out of their silly little helmets.

He waved and gave thumbs-up and disappeared around the next bed. She sat on the platform, legs dangling off over empty space, and imagined seven different ways to get revenge and another seven different ways to make Freeman purr again, and texted her mom to tell her she’d made progress with the cat. The text wouldn’t send until she was above-ground in a few hours, but her mom had been asking.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok I have everything out of my system that I had for this so far. Next is apparently Blue Shift write-through and that's going to take me a bit. But goal was to get to Blue Shift reasonably fast, after establishing Calhoun and Freeman's characters and relationship. I have no impulse control when it comes to writing (or posting apparently) and we're in significant lockdown so... this may get written a lot faster than Crowbar did. It ought not be anywhere near as intense, though probably a lot more tragic. Now that I've made a soft happy Calhoun I get to destroy their world.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things Begin.

  


“You’re late, Calhoun!” 

“I clocked in thirty minutes ago." 

“Computer system’s down, no record of it.” 

“Great, then clock me in yourself!” She said. The door lock hadn’t been a prank, it’d been a symptom of a general Mesa-wide system malfunction that was knocking out the computer systems server by server. She would have been disconcerted by it, but this was the Mesa. Someone three levels away in Electronics Development probably hadn’t notified them of a pending software update and was just now pushing it through. 

But it upset the delicate scientist psyche, and she was dispatched to resolve a lift error on the other side of the level. The tram to that side was offline, naturally, so she took the back way through the decommissioned cafeteria and came out on its old tram station. 

The tram station should have been dead, blacked out and blocked off, but the lights were on and she heard the hum of an incoming tram car. 

It slid slowly past her with a single passenger. A man in a suit, not a white-coat, not a security guard, not one of the numerous housekeeping, sanitation, repair and food services workers. He looked government. He looked important. 

He looked right at her. 

She considered radioing it in but if he had a decommissioned tram line up and running for his personal use, chances were she wasn’t supposed to know he existed. That type showed up from time to time. 

She found the broken lift, and its two occupants. 

“Well it’s about time!” the first scientist said. “You aren’t being paid to mosey around!” 

She made a show of squinting at his badge to read it. “Well, Doctor Morgan, I’m not paid to fix elevators neither,” she said, “But if you feel like taking a chance here I can start pushing buttons and see what happens.” 

“Just make it work!” he said. 

Well, alright then. She put in her security override key, turned it to manual operation, and hit the button for their floor. The lift shuddered and began its descent. So far so good; she radioed in that the problem appeared solved and that she’d be escorting the scientists to their stations to see if any more doors wanted security overrides. 

Then the lift shuddered and stopped. Lights flickered and a general electrical system warning droned from the overhead speaker. That was new, but again, it was the Mesa. She tried the buttons and security key, then tried the fire override to drop them to the next floor, and nothing worked. 

“It’s those Anomalous Materials people again,” Dr. Morgan growled. 

They were in Anom’s vicinity, and Anom certainly had its share of funny stuff, but this on a day with widespread computer glitches and odd tram use? Something else was going on, she thought. She just couldn't put her finger on what, if neither the scientists nor the security personnel had been alerted beforehand. 

She wished Richards was still around. Her new rotation was mostly indoors-only, men and women imported from the city. She couldn’t just radio in a general _“We’re trapped in an elevator and we think Anom is mucking around again but who knows maybe we’re being attacked by aliens.”_ Richards would have gotten the message: today’s a crap shoot, good luck, let’s get beer later. 

“I’d be surprised if they have a single good brain among them,” the other scientist retorted. 

She bristled. Freeman was in Anom, part-time at least, and he seemed to have something between the ears. But then the lift started moving again, haltingly, with protests and flickering lights and the squeal of a brake system being rudely punished. 

They dropped through over the loading dock for the next level, and hung there in open space. She smelled the hot plastic scent of a charge buildup moments before it happened and stepped back from the panel but Dr. Morgan was not so fortunate. Electricity melted through the elevator panel and completed the circuit through his shoulder. He fell, limbs twitching, not breathing. 

“Medical emergency!” She yelled through the radio, giving elevator number and their approximate location. How exactly they’d be rescued she didn’t know; that was someone else’s problem. Her problem was she had an electrocuted scientist on the floor and a reasonable idea of how to do CPR, but no mouth shield or AED. 

Then the other man yelled and cowered, and she watched, mesmerized and unbelieving, as a creature materialized in the covered walkway over the loading dock. Her mind spun- walked on two legs, hunched over, a cyclopean red eye, two, or was that _three_ upper arms? And it was chasing a screaming scientist. 

She partitioned the information into two responses. First response was that this was the single most elaborate prank she’d ever had the honor of watching unfold, and why hadn’t anyone invited her in on it because she would have given her eyeteeth to wear an alien costume and chase scientists around. 

The second response was to trust her senses, and the deep cold grip on her gut, that said _everything you are watching is real._ Something was very, very wrong, and the man whose chest she was compressing was dead, and the guard she watched be run over by the freight cart was dead, and the scientist fleeing another kind of creature below them was dead. 

The freight cart flung its payload of fuel barrels into the far wall. The lift shuddered at their impact and heat from their ignition washed over her face. The other scientist screamed again and lay flat on the floor, arms over his head. She wished for a moment she could have that response too, but no. She had a job. And she wasn’t paid to mosey around or fix elevators, she was paid to protect peoples’ lives. 

Then something snapped and the floor dropped from under her. She felt the distinct moment of weightlessness then came to a hard sudden stop. Something slammed into her shoulders, her forehead bounced off the elevator floor and her vision went black. 

  
  



	8. Chapter 8

  


Blue uniform on the ground; officer down. Alarm blaring. Calhoun tried to move but something heavy pinned her back and legs. She faded in and out, tracking motion over the dead body, thinking _rescuers_ until the thing tracked blood away. Not rescuers. Enemies. 

_Get up._ She didn’t want to. The ground was comfortable, flat, and not moving anymore. _Get up._ Whatever was out there had eaten through the dead guard’s shoulder, showing the vivid red and white of muscle and scraped bare bone. It’d be her turn next. 

_Get up!_ She got her hands under her and levered up enough for wiggle room, then caught the edge of the lift with her fingertips and pulled herself forward, out from under the cement and steel. It hadn’t crushed her; she was lucky, it had fallen crosswise. The two other passengers not so much. Red blood seeped along the floor, spreading in river-delta patterns towards the lowest corner. 

She crawled out of the elevator and stood, one hand on the wall, the other on her gun. Her vision was blurry and the room kept wanting to tilt, and her knees, chest and head ached from impact with the elevator floor. Probably mild concussion, she thought. _Gotta get that checked later._ She looked up, at the grey cement ceiling above. Maybe much later. 

The guard was Simons, a city guy who’d been there six years. She rolled him over and closed his eyes. His ears were full of blood, as if he’d been killed by pressure; aside from the section eaten off his back she couldn’t find any other obvious signs of trauma. She radioed in her position but got no response, not even a crackle of connection to the repeater. No help was going to come down here. 

She eyed the bloody tracks leading away. Little clawed paw prints, almost dog-like, went around the corner and disappeared. She’d have to round that corner if she wanted to get anywhere. 

Simons had been trying to pry open a stuck hatch with a crowbar when he was killed. She picked it up and hefted its weight. A handy weapon, better than a gun for close-quarters, and more range than a knife, and it fit nicely on the belt. 

Time to see what was around the corner. 

Two of them. Two round, fat-bodied four-legged things with wicket little mouths under their insectoid single eye. She shot the first one four times as the second screamed at her, and she knew where the blood on Simons’ ears came from. Its scream ratcheted up until it released a sonic scream that rattled through her chest and jaw and brought stabbing pain through her forehead. She dropped back a step, still firing, and killed the second one. 

That hurt. She rubbed her temples and shook her head. The alarm kept up its bleat. 

The landing held stacks of crates labeled for the level’s wet laboratory; detergents, if she remembered right. A short flight of stairs led down into the wet lab’s floor; the door to its observation deck was locked. 

And the door to the laboratory made the hair on her arms stand on end. She heard the dry snap of electric discharge and stepped back. Something must have bridged the corridor infrastructure with the electrical system for the floor below. Emergency shutoff…. There should be one _somewhere._ Black Mesa had been constructed haphazardly, by contemporary laboratory standards, grown organically as demand and markets changed from cold war through to the digital revolution; her training included an overview of useful things like all five generations of fire suppression systems and if she remembered right, the wiring was equally redundant. She fought through the storage boxes, following the wall, and yes, there was a conduit. The box at its end held a nice big red “pull me in case of emergency” lever, complete with its own lockout lock. 

This counted as an emergency, she thought, and didn’t bother signing the lockout. 

Cutting the circuit plunged the room into total darkness. The little security-issue maglight put barely a dent in it, but at least it was a _quiet_ darkness. The silence was nice, only the sound of her own breathing and her own heartbeat and her own keys jangling to make her jump. 

But the corridor was no longer energized, and that’s what mattered. Its emergency lighting was still on, apparently powered by the floor above. She wondered if she’d just cut the lights on some poor soul below her, locked in battle with the strange creatures. 

_Aliens_ , Calhoun thought. Use the right words. Aliens. Stated firmly, grasped the word with both hands. Don’t hesitate, don’t wonder. Shoot first, ask questions later. 

The detergent lab had lost most of its products all over the floor. She skirted the viscous mess; what exactly went into the detergent experimentation she didn’t know, but the raw materials barrels were marked with a disturbing sequence of hieroglyphs in little yellow diamonds that meant _caustic_ and _carcinogenic_ and also _slippery._ She could probably deal with carcinogens better than loss of traction, truth be told. Cancer could go on the “deal with later” list alongside that concussion, but hostile aliens weren’t going to give her the leeway to fall flat on her face. 

Speaking of which. 

She heard them before she saw them, a distinct high chitter and the scratch of claws on slick tile. Two small round brownish organisms, like walking puffballs, scuttled towards her. She shot them both. 

_Shoot first, ask questions later._ They had visible claws and teeth and they were a heck of a lot bigger than the biggest tarantula she’d ever seen. They warranted shooting. 

The observation deck was unhelpfully locked away behind very thick glass, but a ladder in the maintenance closet got her access to the HVAC superstructure. The narrow crawlspace was eerily painted in blood-red emergency light, but it was free of aliens. 

She wasn’t the only one who’d had this idea. A scientist, an older man, was hunched against a duct, the red lights making harsh shadows on his face. She recognized him as she got closer. Dr. Feston, a chemist who came through her checkpoint. A decent enough guy, for Black Mesa. 

Feston appeared in one piece, no blood on his white coat or beige slacks, no black spreading stains under the red lights. “Calhoun!” He said, his voice an excited whisper. “How did you get in here? I energized the hallway to seal the room.” 

Oh. “I turned it off,” she said. “Sorry about that, Simons is dead on the other side. Are you alright?” 

“Don’t worry about me, and don’t tell anyone I’m down here! I think they’re trying to kill us!” 

“Looks that way,” she agreed, though killing out of malice or hunger she didn’t know. A mountain lion and a murderer had entirely different motivations, even if the end result was the same. 

“Get to the canal if you can! It’s the only way out of here.” Feston pointed to the stack of red barrels, correctly locked up behind their safety gate, down on the laboratory floor. “Blow them if you have to, but just hurry! I’ll reset the power lock after you go.” 

She aimed and shot twice, and slid behind the ductwork as the hot, acrid blast swept up. The explosion had done the job and torn the heavy steel gate to shreds. 

Huh. Gotta think about that OSHA regulation, maybe next time store the explosives in a more solid container. 

Corridors behind the broken gate led into the freight delivery system. The whole thing felt like a farce on a historical drama, and now she was in the servants’ quarters, out of sight of the investors and researchers, and therefore off the OSHA radar. The freight lift got her to a loading dock over a pit that felt a mile deep, and was crawling with more of the screaming dog things. She shot them and reloaded, conscious of her diminishing ammunition. One clip left- 

-Yellow lightning bridged the loading dock, coalescing in a ball of white-hot light. She shielded her eyes and blinked away the after-image, and saw something new. It stood on two legs, and it blinked a baseball-sized ruby eye, and it directed the lighting her way with long clawed forelimbs. 

She dropped to the floor and fired up at it, her chin on the dirty cement. Three shots, center of mass, just as she’d trained. 

It fell backwards with a screech, twitched twice, and died. 

The wall behind her was scored with sooty black electrical burns. She had no illusion what that discharge would have done to her. 

_Shoot first._ She took a breath and inspected the body. It was organic, it bled a bitter-smelling yellow blood, and it wore a green collar and matching green bands on its wrists. Protection? Weapons? Some kind of advanced technology? The thing had _teleported._ Who knew what it was capable of, aside from killing humans, of course. That aspect wasn’t in question. 

She heard the crackle of energy and shot the next one as it materialized, before it could attack. Maybe it was bad form. Maybe, somewhere in this mess, someone was doing a better job at first contact. But she wasn’t going to risk it, not when there were people like Feston hiding down here, hoping for rescue. She couldn’t bring them with her but she could at least keep them from being eaten or fried. 

The main freight dock for the level’s wet labs was crawling with screamer dogs. She shot twice into each one, dead-center, and silenced them. She found Jeremy, a local kid, crushed under a barrel near the freight loading controls. His face and body weren’t in much condition to be recognized but his boots were; he always wore cowboy boots, against regulation and dress code and common sense and everything else. 

Calhoun took off her helmet and wiped the sweat from her forehead. It was running into her eyes and making them burn, despite the room’s subterranean chill. She’d have to call Jeremy’s folks. At least they'd know he’d died quick. 

  
  



	9. Chapter 9

Calhoun could see where she needed to go, but she didn’t like it at all. The ladder ended half-way down the wall and the catwalk that had connected it to the loading dock was gone down the dark shaft below. The Maglite didn’t touch the bottom of the shaft. Apparently the loading dock was built over the remains of one of Black Mesa’s silos, cooling towers, mine shafts or other fun hazards. 

She eyed the red ladder from the freight lift. It wasn’t _that_ far, but it was plenty far over a hundred-foot drop. One jump, one try. 

_Don’t take all day about it,_ she thought, took two running steps and threw herself at the ladder. Her hands closed around the third rung up and she clung for dear life. 

Above the freight lift, the corridors were showing signs of decay. This section was older, decommissioned, and a perfect place for hostile life-forms to teleport in unchallenged. She shot one as it materialized hardly five feet away. A second began forming behind her. She whirled and shot it, then paused to reload. The scrape of a claw on steel- a third one stepped from behind a fallen girder, energy already glowing between its claws. She dropped to one knee and shot as its bolt seared overhead, close enough to make her hair stand on end. 

She was panting, still kneeling, when the discharge raked over her shoulders. 

The electricity made her muscles jump and contract, sent her face-down on the cement. She tasted metal and blood and smelled the burning synthetic of her uniform. Her heart beat hard and erratic. She took a shallow breath and tried to guess what direction the fourth alien was, before it had time to attack again, before the pain caught up and she couldn’t shoot back. 

There, the red eye. She got the gun up and emptied the clip into it, thankful there were enough bullets. And ouch, there was the pain, coming in waves as burned skin met charred uniform. It was worst on her shoulders and down the back of her arms, and on her neck. The vest had protected her core from the brunt of the discharge but electricity _traveled_ and unless this was some newfangled sort of alien energy that didn’t behave like the usual spark, she could be carrying unknown internal damage as well. 

She crawled to the girder and crouched next to it to get her bearings and assess. Gun reloaded first. Radio was a charred mess so she discarded it. The uniform was also a mess, but she didn’t have options there. It wasn’t _currently_ on fire, so she’d just have to live with the melted bits stuck to burned skin. There would be burn cream, scissors and bandages in a first-aid kit somewhere. Just got to get there first. 

Calhoun took a deep breath, wincing as the movement made things shift. If breathing hurt, the next step was going to hurt a lot more. 

The ladder down to the canal level was long and narrow and unavoidable. She’d have risked sliding down it but the metal was rusty and rough on her palms. Better the pain of shoulder movement than compromising her ability to climb and shoot. 

She got down it. Not quickly, but with control. The pain was not quite all-consuming but it hurt enough to be a dangerous distraction. Thankfully the catwalks in the canal system were not yet overrun. Steam pipes kept the air overly warm and covered all surfaces in a slick layer of condensation. Red safety lights flickered from the margins, where damaged systems had already shut off. She followed the walkway to its end to see if there was a way up the other side that didn’t involve more ladders, and found Dr. Presley. 

She knelt beside the old man, knowing what she’d find even before she reached for his thin neck. He was as dead of a body as she’d ever seen. Not enough blood for him to have bled out there, but the gaping wound on the back of his neck could have caused spinal cord damage as well. It looked like a bite mark of some kind, like something had torn a hand-sized chunk of him right out. 

The little chittering creatures came to mind, with their long claws and rows of sharp teeth, but it didn’t matter. The man was dead. He’d been a professor before being recruited by Black Mesa; somewhere on the East Coast, if she remembered right. Something in aeronautics. He’d missed classrooms and attentive young people and he’d been a lot more talkative than most Black Mesa researchers. 

Calhoun picked up the security-issue shotgun beside him. He’d gotten some use out of it, by the state of the barrel, and she hoped he’d killed whatever had done this to him before he’d died. 

There was no way up that didn’t involve ladders. 

She got up the first four rungs and stopped to breathe and manage pain. Then another few, and another. Every step up only had to be taken once. She couldn’t reach far over her head without grinding the vest into her burns. Progress was slow, but it was steady. She reached the top and crawled into the canal control booth, the space also free of aliens, though she didn’t know for how long. 

And it had a med station. 

She hesitated to use it. They’d been warned again and again not to use the things except in cases of dire emergency. The experimental serums, drugs, painkillers and steroids inside them were proprietary Black Mesa tech, certified by the Mesa’s in-house physicians and biochemists; she’d signed a statement when she was hired to the effect of “I won’t sue you if I use a med box and grow a second head” but all the folks who’d been around a bit said, whatever you do, _don’t use a med box._

But this was not a good day for choices, and two heads was better than none. She unstrung its delivery tube and stabbed the six-pronged microneedle array into her upper arm, per the diagram on the box front. Her arm throbbed as whatever was in the thing entered tissue, and while it immediately deadened the pain of the burns- _morphine? Some experimental new painkiller?_ -it provided plenty of other discomforts. Her shoulders and neck itched furiously and her vision went hazy. She held herself still to keep from tearing the skin off. The box chimed complete, its little onboard biorhythm reader apparently telling it her blood pressure and heart rate were adequate, and she detached the needle array. In a perfect world, she’d have tagged the box for a reset and Mesa Medical would come through and sterilize it, replenish its stocks and change out the used microneedle tip, but that probably wasn’t going to happen. 

She just left it dangling for the next person to use, and hoped no one before her had had any particularly contagious blood-borne pathogens. Her head felt compressed and sound was muffled, the overhead lights had grown interesting multicolored halos, and she was hit with a wave of nausea. Ah, all her favorite reactions to heavy painkillers. 

In the comparative safety of the booth, she peeled off the vest and uniform shirt and scraped off as much of the melted plastic as she could. The synthetic fabric uniforms were abysmally hot outside, stiff and uncomfortable and clammy inside, and were impossible to get the sweat stink out of. And now, a new reason to hate them, she thought, as she pulled bits of hardened material from the newly-grown scars. The burns ran over her shoulders and arms in a fractal pattern of fresh red tissue and they were still plenty tender and itchy to the touch. 

She put the ruined shirt back on and the charred vest over it. Hopefully it wasn’t too compromised to do its job should something else get the drop on her. There ought to be more at other security stations, she just had to get there. 

The HEV repair station beside the med box wasn’t going to do her any good, but it made her think of Freeman. Where was he? Was he in the HEV today down in Robotics? She hoped so; it would be better protection than the starched white lab coats she’d seen on too many bodies. 

Below the booth brown flood canal waters swirled past. It wasn’t a part of the sewer system proper, just diversion channels for high water, but there was still plenty of liquid shunted off into them so as not to stress the undersized system. 

And there was a freight lift going _up._ She keyed the button to call the lift, helpfully located on the wrong side of the channel from her, and quietly swore at whoever had designed the place. It descended with a load of explosives, for reasons she couldn’t begin to guess, and four more aliens. 

She shot them all, not giving them time to figure out where she was shooting them from. They were trapped it the narrow space below the freight lift, no cover for them, and they all died without shooting back. Such was war. 


	10. Chapter 10

The lift went _up._ Right direction, but wrong side of the canals. A swift-flowing river of brown debris and sewer muck flowed past and into a turbine-style mechanical grinder, without the benefit of guardrails for the eight-foot drop or an emergency shutoff switch. 

Calhoun eyed the crate marked _explosives_. A lot of Black Mesa's work was difficult to describe in layman's terms, but she doubted any of the researchers could have given a coherent account of how that delivery ended up down here. Maybe that was the point; one of Security's jobs was to keep an eye out for researchers using their company credentials to purchase and move controlled or illegal substances. She made a mental note to follow up on that one, should the opportunity arise. 

Should anyone be alive to ask. But if someone thought they could use an alien incursion as an excuse to dodge legal responsibility, _they had another think coming._ It was hard to be angry at the nebulous concept of invaders from another world, but she could be plenty angry with arrogant scientists who thought their personal agendas and profits were more important than their coworkers' safety. 

The maintenance access corridors along the pipes got her as far as the overflow tanks. A catwalk had once bridged the chamber but it was long gone. Thick green sludge swirled around junk and debris. The place smelled heavily of swamp and wet decay and the walls were streaked with rust and fungus. Maybe the channels on the far side of the tank would lead to the upper levels. She imagined a wet, slimy climb, but she was running short of options. 

This was going to be unpleasant. 

She dropped into the pool and sank immediately. The water had looked about three feet deep but was closer to twelve and of course there were no depth markers. She swam up along the wall and got her head above water, coughing and spitting and wiping it frantically from her eyes. Her boots and uniform were heavy and cumbersome in the water. She scrambled for a ledge, found nothing to hold onto, and swam for the far side and its channels. Beyond a broken grate was a dead-end and an emergency flow control valve. She took a breath, prayed it would work, and opened the valve. 

The chamber flooded with cold fresh water, diluting the swampy sludge. She had probably just emptied the food court’s potable storage tanks or something, but they had bigger problems than tap water. The ledge was now eight inches above the surface, within reach. 

Something heavy draped across her back. 

She flinched away from it but it didn’t come off. It stuck. It stuck and it _moved,_ and she was hauled upwards out of the water by her vest. A moment of flailing panic, a mental image of being caught in some piece of machinery-she reached around and got a grip on the cable-like thing with her right hand. It was wet and cold and it burned as dozens of tiny needles punctured her skin. She traced it upwards with the handgun’s sights to the ceiling overhead, and shot left-handed. 

A new alien. Red, round, and toothed, and reeling her in like a fish. Five bullets before it released its hold. The cable on her back went slack and she fell back into the tank. Tongue. That’s what it was. She shivered and climbed out, one eye on the ceiling. 

Tongue. Like a frog and a fly. Blood welled up from pinpricks on her palm. Another thing trying to kill her. 

Five feet away, a body lay in pieces; blood-soaked blue uniform, helmet, dropped gun and belt. Boots. Not enough left to identify. She picked up the utility belt and took the spare clips and undamaged radio. “Whoever you are, the thing that ate you is dead,” she said aloud, and refused to wonder if they had been a friend of hers. 

  


A crackle of energy, a flash of yellow- she shot into the teleport nexus, and into the next one, before the aliens could materialize. The shotgun seemed to do the trick if she could get close enough; either killing the alien or interrupting their teleport process. 

The third attacker picked an inauspicious teleport point; it fell through a broken section of flooring to its death thirty feet below. 

One for Black Mesa. 

  


The next section of catwalk maze followed cleaner, newer pipes towards the treatment plant. Water streamed from her uniform and vest and her boots sloshed with every step, feet sliding in wet socks. A small annoyance, comparatively speaking, but if she could find a security locker with a solid door, she'd stop and wring everything out. 

A pale two-legged, clawed thing lurched across the bridge in front of her. She raised her gun, then recognized the white lab coat. Human? She tried to reconcile the familiar researcher uniform with the fleshy growth on its head and the dangling, elongated fingers. 

Then it turned towards her, and it moaned as its chest opened up like a sideways mouth, all red and glistening inside, with white teeth like jutting broken ribs. It reached for her with those long claws and she shot it and kept shooting until it fell. It made an awful sound as it collapsed, part animal shriek and part pitiable human cry, and it stank of stomach and blood. 

But it wasn't human. It could not possibly be human. 

She rolled it over after shooting it again in the back of the head. The thing wore a standard-issue lab coat with the Mesa insignia embroidered on the pocket, pale blue pinstripe collared shirt and grey tie of antiquated width, now soaked in fluids. The mouth-gash split it from collarbone to belly button. 

Claws anchored the bulbous growth to the head. Another small mouth full of sharp little teeth sat about where a human mouth would be, but above it was the smooth curve of pale soft flesh. 

She remembered the small chittering creatures with their claws and teeth, the way they'd ran at her and how high they could jump, and she went cold all over. 

A step-scrape on steel mesh. A wet-sounding cough and moan. She stood slowly and reached for the shotgun. Three more of them shuffled down the corridor, coming straight for her. 

She shot right barrel, left barrel and right again, half the chambered shells, aiming for the throat. Those were people in there, she thought, and furiously hoped they were already dead. All three fell as she shot them but she reloaded the shotgun before she approached, and shot each one through the temple with the handgun. No chances, none at all, of one of those things getting back up. 

Humans. Her chest hurt and her breath was shallow. Humans, turned into something horrific by the small parasites, forced to hunt and prey on one another. Why couldn't aliens just stay aliens? Why'd they have to go and do this too? 

Her mind conjured the image of Freeman's face under that fleshy head, his narrow chest split by the parasite fangs, ribs exposed as the beast coopted his dead body for its own use. She had to know. She didn't want to know, didn't want to see familiar faces under the parasites, but if she walked away she'd wonder forever. There was no guarantee she'd find Freeman in the mess. Maybe he was safe. Hopefully he'd played to his strengths and avoided trouble and was already outside on a roof somewhere out of the way. 

She slid the crowbar between the parasite body and the skull and levered it off. The thing made a wet squelching sound as it came free, with rough resistance from claws embedded in bone, but the face under it wasn't one she recognized. Too old, skin a different color, no goatee. Eyes and nose gone, sockets empty where the parasite had drilled through them to reach the brain, forehead shattered by her bullet. 

Her stomach rolled at the sight. She took the ID badge off the coat and wrote on the back where and when she found the body, then wrote the name, _Dr Timothy Jones,_ on the lab coat above the chest-mouth. Maybe some rescue crew would make it down here before the body rotted away, but not likely. She put the badge in her pocket and did the same for the others. Four strangers, all researchers. She could use personnel files to find their next of kin and at least verify their deaths, give a little closure. 

The families didn't ever need to know how their loved ones died. 

  


The uniform was wet and cold. She was soaked through and still dripping, and the usually-refreshing chill of the underground tunnels was turning icy on her neck. It had nothing to do with the aliens, nothing to do with walking away from the four horrors, she told herself. Nothing at all. But she scanned the shadows overhead, checked the corners, cleared her blind spots before she moved on. All the Black Mesa security training, the police-like drills for intruder detection, the mandatory firearms certification and the monthly marksmanship contests were paying off today. 

How this was all happening wasn't her job and if she tried to figure it out she'd just get distracted from the situation at hand. And right now that situation was attempting to tiptoe through ankle-deep muck between the enormous riser pipes that shielded modern infrastructure from the leaks and damp of the old flood control system. The whole place stank of rust and wet cardboard. At least the aliens made a splash too. 

One made a very big splash. Yellow, blotched with rust-colored spots, with a nasty-looking fishy mouth. It crouched and waggled like a cat about to pounce. She put two bullets in it and it vomited yellow fluids. 

She ducked and the stuff splattered on the pipes and hissed and burned on her uniform and on the backs of her hands. Some kind of acid? It spat again, missing her and coating the pipe with bubbling yellow slime. Enough already! She shot it twice more and it finally died. Her skin burned and reddened where drops had landed, but the water around her ankles was contaminated too. No way to wash it off. 

Shoot first. She didn't like it. Survival was a game of reflex and attention to detail, seeing them before they saw her. Fortunately the ones that zapped things loudly announced their presence. She disrupted two teleports, then heard one she couldn't see. Great, now the thing was in the pipe maze. Something splashed. She rounded the pipe slowly, inching along and trying not to disturb the water. 

Its back was to her. 

She hesitated. _Shoot first._ She shot it with the shotgun. A significant portion of it stayed on the pipe it’d been standing in front of, while the rest vanished below the muck. 

First contact, truce, peace, communication, that was _someone else’s job._ Not hers. If she killed a peacemaker or mediator, well, she was very sorry but she’d pay that price if she lived long enough. _I’ll die to save human lives,_ she thought. _Not on the off-chance any random extraterrestrial might not be as violent as the rest._ Or just hungry, having already developed a taste for human flesh. 

Was she fighting organized soldiers or their equivalent of starving mountain lions? 

Then two more teleported in behind her. She spun and shot one but was too late to disrupt the other. It splashed down, energy already building between its foreclaws. She lunged for cover, slipped and landed hard on her knees as the green bolt slashed overhead. The water in her uniform conducted enough by proximity to send a jolt through her shoulder and arm. 

She shot up into it, lunged over its toppling body and shot the next nexus. It dissipated around her helmet, sending her hair on end as she slid behind a pipe. 

No more crackling. Maybe the area was clear. Too much cover, too dark. The water rippled with dripping condensation, obscuring any movement. She panted, her own breath a roar in her ears. Her knees ached with impact and her boots slipped on the algae-covered floor. 

Gotta keep going, she told herself. 

She thought of a book she’d read once, about people in a capsized ship, fighting to get _up_ though everything pointed down. Maybe there’d be rescue at the top of Black Mesa’s maze. Maybe the military would show up and drop in on long ropes with uniformed professional soldiers and first-responders and she could hand in her list of the dead and become a helper instead of a killer. But they'd never get all the way down here. Gotta keep climbing through the broken, ruined upside-down maze. Keep moving forward. 

The pale green glow of a safety light indicating _exit_ reflected from around the next set of pipes. A narrow corridor led up out of the water and onto a small landing, occupied by another of the spotty spitting things. It was distracted, so she took the opportunity to shoot two shotgun shells into its unprotected back. 

It deflated and died. 

Just over its body was a small maintenance manlift. Perfect. And beside it, a company-issue first aid box. Not an automated one with questionable concoctions, but the old-fashioned scissors-and-gauze kind. She emptied it of its painkiller pills and burn cream and large bandages, and smeared antibacterial ointment across her swollen palm where she’d gripped the tongue-thing. 

Then she unlaced her boots, emptied out the water and twisted her socks from sodden to merely damp. Small things. Better traction, she told herself. Safer this way, as if the moment’s pause required a justification. 


	11. Chapter 11

The right direction was up, but up was being difficult. The lift was out of power or shorted-out, either way it wasn’t moving now at all, and the sloping sides of the shaft were too steep to climb. She considered yelling for help but the three aliens she’d shot had arrived from that direction. No reason to borrow trouble by inviting more down. 

Wastewater was flowing out, but through a heavy toothed turbine like an oversized sink disposal grinder. She thought back to the route she’d come by, then she made a thorough search. No other doors, hatches, ladders, crawl-spaces or ducts, and no other likely places she could reach without a long drop. 

The _‘in case of fire, please take stairs’_ sticker on the shaft wall mocked her. There were no stairs, she’d been through the place. Maybe once there had been, now locked behind a wall or a welded steel panel, casualty of an expansion or a cave-in, but not anymore. 

Behind a wall. 

She stared at the explosives box. The crate was hip-high and heavy, and the hazard tag read _‘Danger, Picrate Salts, Highly Explosive DO NOT DROP.’_ Below that was an orange diamond with an OSHA explosives hieroglyph and a handful of other warnings. She hadn’t a clue what picrate salts were, but if it would explode on impact… 

No, bad thought. 

But. How else was she going to get out? She stared at the box, and at the sewer channel, and at the box again. Moving it would risk jarring whatever was inside and setting it off, and she had no idea how much of an explosion the stuff would make. She might bring the ceiling down, or she might only dent the turbine. 

Or she might run out of ammunition down here, or water, or air, and die a slow awful death. 

_I’ll be dead either way. Might as well try._ She slid the box carefully off the lift and across the floor to the canal edge. Almost there. Glass containers rattled inside the crate. She gave it a final shove before her better judgement showed up again. 

The box tipped, splashed and bobbed. Glass shattered inside. She ran to the far wall and hunkered down. A small popping sound, then a very large boom, and dust and bits of concrete rained down on her helmet. The water frothed and resumed its course, flowing through the ruins of the turbine. 

Success. Kind of. 

Getting out was still going to require another dip in a questionable liquid. And she’d _just_ started to dry off! 

She lowered herself down into the canal and dropped the last four feet. The water was shallow, only knee-deep, and she landed hard. Her right ankle jolted with pain. Mild sprain, she thought, as she picked her way over the ruined turbine and tried not to get caught on it. The water smelled like an outhouse, no prizes guessing what was in it, carried down from some cafeteria bathroom or poorly-plumbed dormitory overflow. 

Beyond the turbine, a stormwater shaft lead straight down from the surface. She almost yelled for joy at the sight of the white disk of bright sky and the silhouette of human head and shoulders. Someone was up there! 

And they were… dropping something. She hugged the wall as the thing fell, an inert heavy bundle that landed with a splash, covering her in filth. She shook off splattered sewage and looked to see what it was, and choked back an incoherent cry. 

A white face stared back at her, a blue uniform, black vest, grey helmet, and a dead white face. _Griffith._ Gate guard, west entrance. Not the nicest guy, but not deserving of this. 

A second body followed. His partner, Alvarez. She’d come to poker night a few times last year. They both had families, kids. 

_I should close their eyes,_ Calhoun thought, then realized her hands were filthy with sewer water and she had nowhere to clean them. And then, _why does that matter?_

What had killed them? She squinted up at the disk of distant sky. Human voices filtered down, too muffled to get distinct words or see uniforms. More Black Mesa? Contamination? Had they been exposed to something? This was a waste disposal shaft, but hardly the right place to put a biohazard. 

She closed their eyes and performed her ritual of writing names and collecting badges. The sewers were a festering mess of wet organic decay; body recovery was unlikely. Already the current had pushed them against the grating on the far wall and froth and flotsam was collecting over their vests and faces. 

This was _wrong. Wrong to see bodies dumped, to walk away from them down here._

A rusted old ladder bolted to the shaft lead part-way up. Better than nothing, and it’d get her out of the muck. It ended in an overflow channel that did double-duty as maintenance access, but the ledge was comfortably wide and reasonably clean, and as of yet held no bodies, living or dead. 

She rested on her heels, back to the curve of the pipe, and watched the sky through the grating. Heavy steps clanged along it. “Best get on with it,” someone said and the footsteps receded. Male, tired voice. 

This was a terrible puzzle, one she didn’t want on top of all the other disasters. She had their names. She knew they’d been dumped, and she’d let some other court settle the score on their families’ behalf. For now, she just had to live long enough to get out. 

_Out._ Sky. 

The flip-phone in her pocket was damp but working and she had a whole one bar. Personal phones were banned on the job, of course, and naturally none of the locals followed that rule. It should have been tucked in her locker with all other personal belongings for the day. Wherever her locker was. If it still existed. 

She started writing texts. First to her mom, _Grab dad, get out, go to the trailer. I’ll meet you there after work. Disaster at Black Mesa. Get out of town, tell folks to stay clear._ Her dad’s hunting trailer was remote and well-stocked and if Black Mesa couldn’t contain whatever this was, it would be their best chance.

Then she brought up Richards’ number and tried to figure out a coherent explanation for “There’s an alien invasion at work.” 

Wait. 

Richards. Cohen. Skittering. What had his words been? _“It ate his whole head!”_

She went cold. Her fingers clenched around the phone. Skittering in the vents. Things that ate people’s heads. An accident in the desert, something taken from Black Mesa. Not a controlled substance or creative new pharmaceutical at all, no. Something worse. Alive, alien, hostile. 

_Cohen’s thing that ate Fredrickson,_ she tapped out. _There’s more and worse. Disaster in here, people dying. Get the guys together and keep folks from coming into work, I’ll find you when I’m able to._

She shut the phone and closed her eyes. The scent of the sewers filled the air. Flies droned, attracted by the stink, and somewhere up above people were dropping dead security guards into deep holes. 

The phone buzzed and she nearly dropped it. 

Richards. A string of profanity. She almost smiled. He’d taken the time to type more bad words than actual response. _Understood, we’ll block the road and spread word. Stay safe kid._

Stay safe. Alright, she’d try. 

The overflow connected to another wastewater pit, this one laddered to the top. She climbed up and paused at the sound of gunfire. 

A lot of gunfire. Fast rattling automatic fire, the more rhythmic tat of a full Glock clip being emptied fast as the trigger could be pulled, and deeper belch of a shotgun. Sounded like a Friday night at the highway gravel pit, with less broken glass and country music. 

Sounded like a war. 

She inched up through the shaft, helmet first, and froze at nose-level with the rim. The south entrance was straight ahead, and thoroughly walled up. It was only used for heavy freight and not often even for that but now it wasn’t going to be used for anything. 

Military-green sandbags and heavy cement barriers blocked off the big steel door, and even that was closed. The gunfire was coming from the far side of it, the entrance tunnel, she realized. Something was putting up a lot of fight in there, and someone else, a lot of someones, had a lot of firepower to spend on it. 

This wasn’t Black Mesa. 

Not that olive green, the automatic weapons- 

-she almost dropped down the shaft as a bullet pinged off the rock beside her face. Instead she made a snap decision and hauled herself up from the hole and rolled into the dirt, pressed to the ground. Scant cover, but more options. 

“Hold your fire!” she yelled but the bullets kept whirring overhead. Then they stopped, and she heard the bleat of a motion-sensor. 

An automatic, mounted on a tripod, with a motion-sensor to set it off. Of all the diabolical contraptions, and illegal to boot. 

Black Mesa had some small-caliber drone guns mounted in odd deep corners, relics of concessions they’d wrangled from Congress at the height of the Cold War and guarding a stockpile of precious metals and research-grade plutonium, or so the story went. But those drone guns were deep inside secure storage behind her, not out here at the gates. 

And not pointed _inward._

The drone guns were inactive without motion, so she continued her roll and came up around the corner, out of their sightline and safe. The road in from the south entrance led to a little-used trainyard, another relic; the only thing on the rail past Black Mesa was the old military base. 

The old, but still occupied, used-for-staging-and-training military base. 

_Please let me be wrong,_ she thought as she keyed open the truck tunnel door to the train yard. 

The tunnel was quiet and empty, save for the click of hazard lights coming from an abandoned Jeep. Older model, square body, its doors open and its orange lights blinking on-off-on-off. 

She approached it warily, shotgun up. A dark red wet stain fanned out from under the car and her heart sank. 

More blue uniform. Another coworker dead, a man she didn’t recognize, a bullet-hole in his forehead and the back of his skull gone. 

He’d been executed. Shot point-blank, he’d looked his killers in the eye. Unless there was some other new alien around she hadn't met yet, one carrying what behaved very much like a handgun, his killers had been his own species. 

She swallowed something sharp and clenched her fists until her nails bit. She wanted to wipe her face but her hands were still contaminated. 

A second body slumped in the jeep, a scientist, shot in the side and through the head. She took their ID tags and wrote names, her hands shaking. And wrote cause of death. _Murdered._

Mad scientists, questionable governmental oversight (or lack thereof) and shady corporate contracts she could understand. Aliens, well, that was so far beyond reason it looped back around to the horrifyingly absurd. But this? The military, her own country’s military, the next door neighbors, for heaven’s sake, in New Mexico terms, gunning down her coworkers? Dumping their bodies in the sewer, leaving them to rot in the tunnels? 

Her stepdad had friends at the base, went to the veterans' center in town with a lot of men and women who worked or had served there. Calhoun knew a handful of base staff personally and had met dozens more at the gravel pit, or out coyote hunting, or at the BBQ place on 2nd & Main. 

Nice kids, more or less, she'd always thought. A little uptight at times, tended to unwind too hard. Loud, earnest, dusty and oblivious, but capable of this? 

Her imagination conjured up a vision of an olive-green uniformed figure hauling a security guard up by the vest, forcing them to kneel, putting a standard-issue handgun to their forehead, pulling the trigger. 

_Just following orders Ma'am._

She exchanged her soggy, melted vest for the dead man’s. “I’m sorry but I need this more than you do. Yours hasn’t been half charred,” she said aloud. The rest of her still stank but at least there were no more melted edges digging into flesh. The uniform shirt was scorched and torn in places but she didn’t quite feel up to trading tops with the dead man. 

A vest felt scant protection from an alien that could eat one's skull out, or channel electricity, and it felt like tissue paper against the distant sound of automatic gunfire. 

The shotgun felt better. Felt solid and strong in her hands. 

There would be no kneeling. No compliance, not after this. She had no desire to kill people but, as she looked back at the Jeep, blood dripping like oil from the undercarriage, if the need came she wouldn't hesitate. 


	12. Chapter 12

The outlet into the trainyard was guarded. She came around the corner, caught a glimpse of four uniformed people with weapons drawn, and stumbled back. Bullets sparked on the cement wall and the big steel doors clanged shut. 

Well, she had her final answer on military hostility. At least they hadn’t pursued her. 

_Maybe,_ maybe they’d mistaken her for an alien. Maybe they’d just finished another skirmish and were sensitive on the trigger, liable to shoot anything that moved. Poor discipline, despicable gunmanship, but understandable if they’d been dropped into the middle of an alien incursion and already seen some losses. 

But she didn’t want to be a casualty to their fear and distrust, and the scientist and guard in the tunnel behind her had been killed at close range. No question as to their identities. 

She backtracked to the service alcove near the jeep. A maintenance hatch lead down into the steam tunnels, where hot water from the reactor system was piped under the roads and rails to keep them ice-free in the winter. She wasn’t familiar with this part of Black Mesa; the tunnels were deteriorating, some damage clearly from recent destabilization, and some damage, surrounded by algae and fungal growth, had been ongoing for months or years. 

Black Mesa was too big, too cumbersome. Too many layers of forgotten projects, decommissioned spaces, forbidden access tunnels and accident cover-ups. But right now, she thought, as she waded into fresh steaming water, she could appreciate a little leakage. The steam tunnels had breached and partially filled from the recirculation loop and the water, while stale, was wonderfully clean and clear compared to the muck she’d slogged through to get this far. 

She took off the helmet and vest and scrubbed down as much of the filthy uniform and boots as she could and sluiced water through her short hair, ridding it of any splatters and grime. She’d carry the memories of the bodies she’d encountered forever but no reason to carry the smell of their grave too. It’d take a good detergent to get it all off but, after the scrub-down and swim through to the far side of the flooded tunnel, the pungent smell of outhouse-vault no longer overwhelmed everything else. 

The access tunnels beyond, apparently either in mid-construction or mid-destruction, contained a scattering of the little parasites and very little else. The things took more than one bullet to kill but she didn’t want them close enough to jump, not now that she knew what they were. 

She navigated a partial collapse, shot two teleporting aliens and paused to reload the shotgun. A third crackled down behind her and she snapped the gun up to shoot it. Static coursed down her back and her knees buckled from the shock. She caught herself before her chin hit the cement floor and rolled to shoot the fourth alien. Not a direct hit-her heart was still beating-but enough of one to sear fresh holes in uniform and skin. 

Then another one teleported, and she swore and scrambled to get up and back. The discharge merged into an explosion and she threw her arms up to cover her face. Shrapnel tore through her uniform and the acrid scent of burning acrylic filled the tunnel. The alien had teleported in beside a barrel of liquid floor sealer, plenty flammable in its uncured state. 

Pinpricks of pain spread down her forearms. Nothing more teleported in, so she paused to fish out the bandages she’d pocketed and mop up the blood. Three large gashes from flying bits of barrel, but the rest were superficial. Hopefully there would be no more trips through the sewer system. 

A temporary barricade of toolboxes, old electronics, chunks of cement and other debris blocked the passage. Alright, chances were someone was alive down here. No bodies on this side, so hopefully they were safe on the other side. The only way around the barricade, however, was the ductwork. 

She glared at the dark square mouth of the ceiling duct. She would fit-she’d been in them plenty of times-but it wasn’t exactly roomy. She’d gotten sent on the usual ‘unlock-the-door-from-the-inside’ snipe hunts as a new guard, and then she’d gotten sent on a couple actual security errands when door electronics and fancy new scanners decided to fritz. She wasn’t the shortest or smallest person in her squad but somehow she ended up in the vents more than anyone else. 

Right now, she thought, maybe that was a good thing. 

The vent was angled, a nice arm and thigh workout to brace and scramble up the smooth steel. 

She heard the _scree_ and scrape of claws, got her arm up and flashlight on in time to see the fleshy pale body launch itself for her face. She put her head down and felt it latch onto her helmet, sharp pointed claws digging into skin around the rim. One claw got her ear and she bit back a shriek. Knife- she had a knife, where was it? There, she got the blade open and stabbed blindly into the weight on her head, just as it worked its way over the curve and onto her neck. Its soft body deflated wetly over her neck and back. 

Nausea rolled through her but she held it down. Having the thing dead all over her was bad enough, she wasn’t going to throw up in the vent and then have to crawl through that too. 

She dropped into a storage closet and shook off the dead parasite. The back of her neck was slimed with its innards and the collar of her shirt stuck. 

Gunfire. Close. Metallic blatting from somewhere nearby, echoing loud down the cement corridor. She knelt by the stairs. Two shooters, the sounds of their fire merging into one continuous noise. She leaned out around the wall. From the angle only two heads were visible, black gas masks and army-green helmets. 

They were firing through a door; they hadn’t seen or heard her yet. She thought of the jeep, the dead men, the red ring of powder burn around the entry wounds, of the drone guns pointed in and the spray of bullets from the trainyard door. If she shot now, she’d kill one before they had time to react. Maybe both, if she was quick. 

No. No proof these soldiers had participated in the killings, and if she opened fire first those bullets couldn’t be taken back. They may be living on their trigger fingers, panicked and seeing enemies everywhere, but she wouldn’t sink to their level. 

They paused to reload, the click of ejected empty magazines. Their radios crackled static, other orders for other groups. 

“Hold your fire!” She yelled. “Civilian coming up!” 

One soldier took two steps towards the stairs, dropped to a knee and raked bullets down the wall. 

“Hold your fire!” She screamed, covering her face against fragments of cement and metal. 

_“Another live one,”_ the radio-crackle voice through helmet comms. _“Hold the door, I’ll take care of it.”_

She leaned out around the wall. The soldier had elevation but also a short-barreled automatic and poor form. Bullets cut a line down the staircase but flew wide as she ducked back. “Don’t shoot! I’m Black Mesa Security!” She yelled. 

Just more bullets for answer. The cement was pocketed and torn, shards of rock and metal like hail down the hall. 

How much ammunition would they waste on her before they got a lucky shot in? It’d only take one to kill a human, if it got put in the right place. 

One bullet. Less than what it took to kill the head-eaters. 

She checked the handgun. Six in the clip, no time to reload, but plenty to finish the job. She swallowed around the sudden constriction in her throat. Too many familiar faces flashed past. Odds were poor she’d be taking a life she knew; the base was huge, thousands of soldiers came through there, but. But. One young idealistic country kid with a flag in his eyes and a paycheck in his pocket was much like another. 

_Please don’t make me do this._ "Stop shooting! I'm on your side!" Gunfire her only reply. 

She pivoted out from cover, crouched, head down, elbows in, presenting the smallest, most armored target possible, took her sights in a half a heartbeat and, as automatic fire seared around her, fired twice. Center of mass, center of face. The soldier crumpled. His squadmate swung his automatic with a yell and she fired twice again, center of the dark uniformed body, center of black mask under the helmet. 

She was a good shot. She knew it, she’d known it from hours at the range, from testing her skill against veterans, survivalists and her classmates, from the stack of torn-up targets she’d amassed in the back of her closet, from the streak of wins in Black Mesa’s monthly marksmanship tallies. _Never again._ No more hiding in a corner as bullets flew and people died. 

But she hadn’t done all that to be here right now, and the scent of gunpowder, hot metal and fresh blood was bitter as she climbed the stairs and stepped around the bodies. Perfect shots. Exactly as she’d trained; stop with as little force as possible, with as little risk of collateral damage. She hadn’t trained for war, she’d trained for the precision necessary to drop one figure at close range in a crowd, and then she’d prayed she would take that training to her grave. 

Eleven years of practice. 

The handgun felt hot and solid, a part of herself. She reloaded with a full clip, discarding the unfired final two rounds. _If you need more than three bullets you’re doing it wrong,_ her first range instructor’s voice. The man who would become her stepfather. _Doesn’t matter what you’re trying to hit. Don’t spray ‘n pray. Never point a gun at something you ain’t willing to shoot, and never shoot what you ain’t willing to kill._

A wet cough. Someone in the little office was alive, despite the door and observation window shattered by hundreds of rounds. 

The coat was more red than white, blood spiraling outward as it soaked into the cloth. She dropped to her knees beside the man, hands searching for the entry wound. Apply pressure, stop the bleeding; two shots in the abdomen, two in the lower left leg. Broken bones, perforated organs, blood loss- 

“I appreciate your help, but I’m afraid those bastards did their damage already,” he wheezed. The man was weak, skin already losing color. Eyes unfocused. “The military is rounding up everyone and killing them or bringing them up here for questioning. So much for a rescue.” He coughed again, red foam on his mouth and chin. “There’s a plan. Old prototype labs. We didn’t make it. But listen to me, if you want to get out of here alive, find my friend. Dr. Rosenberg. The soldiers have him alive somewhere. With him, you may have a chance.” 

“Hey, stay with me,” she said. She’d scattered her first aid supplies and packed the first bullet hole with gauze. She’d need a tourniquet for the leg-he’d lose it, but better it than life-where was her knife? A pant cuff would do the job, twisted tight with the ruler off the desk. “Stay with me here, we’ll get you out.” 

The flow of blood ebbed between her fingers as heart rate dropped. “No, come on. We’ll find Rosenberg.” 

He shook his head. “Thank you for trying.” 

He died under her hands. She sighed and stared at her palms, painted vivid red in arterial blood. What now? She couldn’t battle military and aliens both, and neither could the rest of the civilians in Black Mesa. 

Get the blood off first. That was something she could do. Alcohol wipes got enough off so she could use her phone. _Military is hostile,_ she texted Richards. _They’re shooting everything that moves._ Then her mom, with a message for her dad to not call his old friends, something had gone sideways and the military was trying to quarantine the facility. No need for them to know the extent of it. Her mom hadn’t texted back from her earlier message but that didn’t mean anything. 

Then she texted Tammy and Amber and everyone else on the poker list, and her mom’s friend Janice who ran the pie place on 2nd street and thought the military was trying to read her mind, because if anyone would believe her and spread word about rogue soldiers it was Jumpy Janice, and then she texted Freeman. 

_3.24 PM. I’m alive, hope you are too. Aliens are hostile. Military is hostile. Assume they’ll shoot on sight. Stay safe, hide if you can. If you get this message send your location and if I’m still alive I’ll come for you. Don’t trust anyone who isn’t Mesa staff._

She hoped he was safe, hoped he’d found a hole to hide in or a path out. His phone was probably in his locker where it belonged but she’d keep trying. And keep looking. Guy like him, brittle as sun-yellowed cellophane? Capable of violence, certainly, if enough bad days stacked up, but far more capable of freezing in place, getting caught in a trap- _stop._ She made herself banish the image of him on the ER bed, chest bare and bloody from the shotgun blast. It was too easy to imagine him now in place of the dead man in front of her, lab coat red over wounds. 

She felt over the dead man's chest and found his ID badge. Harold Sullivan. Murdered. A bullet hole through the plastic. 

_Get up, keep moving._ She caught the edge of the table and hauled herself upright. Her head felt light and her vision flickered. Dehydrated, exhausted. And the day wasn't over yet. 

The nameplate on the desk caught her attention. Reardon. She knew that name. Ah, that's right. Gun club. Black Mesa's marksmanship trials were mandatory for security guards but some members of the science staff joined in. She searched the desk and came up with a box of revolver ammunition, so she searched the rest of the office and found the gun, in the top drawer of the filing cabinet behind a stack of files. Unloaded but no trigger lock. A very nice gun. Heavy, powerful, like her step-dad's. Bigger caliber than the standard-issue side-arm, slower but a whole lot more stopping power. 

Only takes one bullet, just gotta put it in the right place. 

  



	13. Chapter 13

  


The barricade hadn’t been built by the late doctor Sullivan. She went back downstairs, stepping carefully around the soldiers’ bodies and their scatter of casings. 

Flores lay dead on the floor behind the barricade. His helmet and vest had been stripped off and he’d been beaten. He’d fought, by the looks of his hands, but it hadn’t done him much good. She sighed and picked up his vest. It was untouched, unbloodied, unburnt, and in a lot better shape than her own. “They’re dead too,” she said. Her voice sounded wrongly large in the hall, in the silence after the gunfire. She took his ID badge and added it to her sad collection. _Murdered._

The soldiers’ gas masks presented a conundrum. She wanted to know for _sure_ she hadn’t killed someone she knew, or someone whose parents should hear about it from her and not a stranger. But she also did not want to know if a friend had fired on her without cause and beaten her coworker to death. She left their tags on them; unsure of military protocol, and the metal tags would last a lot longer than the laminated plastic ID badges she and her coworkers carried. 

The military had ways of finding its own people. Let them do the work. 

The faces were unfamiliar and distorted by her shots. A freckled young man and an older man, maybe Hispanic. No one she knew. 

She let out a breath. Time to go. Time to keep going, find this doctor Rosenberg, clear a path to safety. 

  


A stairwell lead up and down the building’s corner access. She tried the door below and it was locked, so she started up the next flight. 

And froze. Footsteps above her, a heavy steel fire door opening and slamming shut. Voices, static on the radio. Helmet comms. Four soldiers were on the next flight, walking up, voices muffled behind their gas masks. 

She raised her gun but held her fire; they hadn’t heard her, and as she watched their retreating backs something was tickling her memory. Something with how that last one walked, like glimpsing a familiar face in a crowd. _I know you…._

Another door slammed below her, the one she’d just checked and found bolted. Boots on the cement behind her, two, three pairs, a crowd, she didn't know. Too many. She was good with a gun but she knew her limits; she couldn't survive a firefight in the stairwell with soldiers above and below. Not enough space, nothing to get behind, no mercy had on either side. If the forward group heard her she was dead; if the rear group caught up she was dead, and she was too far past the door she’d come through to retreat. She’d walk right into the group behind her if she turned back to it. 

Nowhere to go but up, and trust it all to intuition. She let the squad in front gain a little ground and followed them up, mindful of the stairwell’s square corners. 

That walk, set of the shoulder, little bit of a limp from that dirt-bike accident freshman year. Behind the mask, there would be brown eyes and thick black brows. She imagined his face still spotted with late acne, chin scuffed with not quite enough beard to shave. Was he still the schoolyard kid in that uniform? Would he hesitate? 

Her life depended on it. 

She set the revolver and its ammunition in a trash can on the next landing and hoped she could come back for it. 

The soldiers had reached the top landing and gone through the door, but loitered there. The gap between the two squads got smaller and smaller. 

She squared her shoulders, raised her empty palms, stepped into the empty door frame and belted out, at the top of her lungs, "Kevin Randal Wellington Junior, your mother would be rolling in her grave. What do you think you're doing here? You skipped graduation, you said you were deployed, you missed your cousin's wedding, and now you're playing little green army men out here in your own backyard?” She paused for breath. Their weapons snapped up but she wasn't dead yet, and that counted as gain. 

Kevin Randal Wellington Junior, playground nemesis and home-grown knucklehead, to his everlasting credit, pulled his gas mask up. She got a good look at his wide round eyes and the quiver in his hands before he smoothed the nerves away. Ah, not so tough, she thought. Still everyone's neighborhood kid brother. 

"Hey! On your knees!" One of the other soldiers clapped a gloved hand to her shoulder and tried to push. 

She braced herself, kept her hands up and stayed standing. Whoever this guy was he wasn't from town. The only person in the room who mattered was Kevin, and Kevin hadn't been able to throw her since seventh grade. 

And these were soldiers, not police officers. Predators, or thought they were. _Don’t trigger a chase reflex. Don’t escalate._ The three strangers exchanged glances and kept weapons pointed at her, but didn't seem to know what to do next. 

"You're not supposed to be here," Kevin said. 

"Neither are you," she retorted. "And put your guns down, I don't want to get shot. Unless you guys know something I don't, I'm not an alien or a threat." 

That glance again. Did they see the blood on her hands? 

"Orders, ma'am. I'm sorry," one of the others said. She spared a glance at him; dark-skinned, by the inch of visible wrist between glove and sleeve, dark-eyed and deep-voiced, and about eight inches taller than her. 

"Orders to what, kill innocent people?" she demanded and regretted her tone. _Don't escalate, please don't escalate_ she thought, and felt the sweat trickle down her temples and arms. "Kevin, I don't know what's happened here but I'm on your side. We all are. What’s the plan for evacuating the scientists and civilians? Let me help you." 

Kevin shook his head. His face was flushed, his pulse elevated. 

"No to my help, or there's no evacuation?" she asked slowly, as if this was news to her. 

The group behind her had reached the top of the staircase. "What's this, Lieutenant?" an older voice asked. 

She didn't turn around. "Kevin?" 

He swallowed. "There's no evacuation," he said. His voice was low, and his eyes darted from her to the men behind her. Eight soldiers in the room now, eight armed men, two guns on her that she could see, no telling how many outside of her vision and she couldn’t afford to look. Her spine crawled, anticipating that first shot. What would it be, small caliber, automatic, shotgun? 

"You know your orders," the man behind her said. 

She knew them too, by that tone of voice, by the white around Kevin’s eyes. _No evacuation. No survivors._

"Captain," Kevin said, "I can't-" and at the same time one of his squad put the cold metal barrel against her temple and her whole self seemed to sink into her boots. She’d gambled her life, the cards were down. 

"Look at me," she interrupted him. "You know this is wrong. You all know. Kevin, you kill me or you walk away. Don't you put this on someone else. And then you go tell my folks what you did. If I can't shoot back it's gotta be you, man. And I don't want my mom getting some stamp-signed letter in the mail. No you go tell her in the living room, you hear me?" She heard her voice crack as she talked, heard the hysteria and knew she was good as begging for her life, but as long as she talked they weren’t shooting. “My folks have been there for you a hundred times and they deserve to know the truth. You swear on your momma’s grave you’ll go to them, then you pull that trigger yourself.” 

"I can't," Kevin's eyes slid off her. "I can’t do this. Please let's just tie her up here. Come on, I can't just-" 

"Can't _what,_ Lieutenant? Can't follow orders?" 

Kevin swallowed again and she tracked the movement of his throat. Then he squared himself and she thought _this is it, I'm done,_ but his gaze steadied on the man behind her. "I can't shoot a friend, Captain. I didn't come here to kill my own people. I'll tie her up. I can’t have her blood on me, sir." 

She heard herself breath again, and bit back the protest against being left helpless for the next parasite to find. Alive was alive, and these were soldiers, not police officers, and it was Kevin, coordinated as a six-month-old puppy, doing the restraining. 

She let him shove her into a folding chair and zip-tie her hands behind her back and her ankles to the chair legs. She smelled the stink of fear and sweat on him as he leaned over her, and the sulfur tinge of gunsmoke. He’d fought today, he’d killed. He took her shotgun and handgun, but when he made a motion towards her boots she twitched an eyebrow and gave him a _don't you dare_ warning glance. 

He backed up. "I'm sorry," he said. "Wish it didn't have to be this way. I'll tell your folks you were killed in action." 

His captain wasn't happy. She could see the man now, a big heavy wide uniform filling the doorway. Two soldiers kept their guns on her as if she was still somehow a deadly threat. 

And then they filed out of the storeroom and closed the fire door behind them. Simple as that. 

Like wolves, they wanted their prey to run and fight. Orders didn’t account for prey that marched into the pack and barked. Orders didn’t account for _we fought like cats and dogs all through high school but I ate dinner at her house every night for two years and her mom got me through 10th grade algebra._

Her breath was shallow, heartbeat rabbit-fast, body just now catching onto how close she’d come to death. Kevin had tightened the zip-ties but she’d held her wrists sideways, presenting the widest possible configuration, and now she had a little play. Enough to wedge her wrists down behind her and lean forward, putting the combined leverage of her weight and core on the ties. Plastic bit into her skin and she clenched her jaw against the sharp pain. Instinct said she’d tear her hands off but logic, and a few nights of boredom with her roomates, said the plastic would break first. It just required some perseverance through the worst of it. 

The plastic snapped. She slit the ankle ties with the knife in her boot. Her right wrist was sore, creased but fine, but the left one had a long shallow contusion and gash across the back where the tie had broken the skin. It wasn’t bleeding yet but it would be, and it’d hurt like a two-inch papercut. 

Kevin had a lot to answer for. Less, she thought, than if he’d actually killed her, but still. She’d be having words with him when this was all over. 

If he was alive, and she was alive. 

  


She retrieved the revolver and tested the door. Unlocked now. They’d be out there somewhere. If he fired on her, she’d fire back. And she wouldn’t be looking under any more gas masks. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> According to Youtube you really can break ziptie cuffs that way.


	14. Chapter 14

The door opened at ground level out onto the building’s employee parking lot, a narrow gorge cut into rock, floored with asphalt and ringed with sheer red walls. Must be on the perimeter, to rate a personal vehicle lot instead of tram access; there would be a security gate in one of the artificial slot canyons then. A way out of the complex. If she could verify the route, hold the door open, maybe there was hope for the surviving Mesa personnel. 

Static, muffled radio chatter. Soldiers in the parking lot, because of course they had the same thought and were blocking the way. _Why?!_ Death on this scale wasn’t cheap. She wasn’t the only security guard who knew how to shoot. There were a lot of other men and women with very high numbers on the marksmanship ranking, and a lot who had other colors of uniform in their past: ex-military, ex-police, ex-international independent security. 

Soldiers were killing, but they were also dying today, and not just by alien bioelectrical weapons or acids or parasites. _We should be working together, not killing each other._ But someone had ordered a mass slaughter, and orders were orders, hang the cost. 

She leaned around the door jam. Three more Mesa-issue jeeps, three more dead people, three soldiers she could see. Her jaw clenched, considering the ethics of shooting them in the back before they saw her. 

Then one turned, yelled, and gunfire swept the loading dock, and she was freed from that decision. She slammed back against the interior wall, breathing hard, and checked the revolver. Bullets enough, if she made them all count. 

She leaned out, heard a barked order and sighted in on the first man. Low, to account for the kick. It was a heavy gun and it threw a heavy slug. The soldiers wore body armor but it wouldn’t account for much at this range with the size of slug. 

One down. Two more came running around the corner. Automatic fire scattered around the door jam. Then the doorway filled with dark green uniform and she shot up into the body in a blind panic, from scarcely a foot away. A soldier had hugged the wall and snuck up to the doorway, and crumpled dead almost on top of her. 

She slid back into the corner again and reloaded. The soldier had an automatic. And a grenade belt. 

Radio static. “Got a live one out here guys.” 

“Move up! Don’t let it get away from you!” 

“Got it. It’s armed, don’t get cocky.” 

Yes, it sure was armed. She leaned forward, on her knees, over the soldier’s body and shot the first green helmet she saw. She’d aimed for the soldier’s midline and let the kick plunge the bullet squarely into the skull. 

The other three were running up to rush her, expending themselves in hopes one would finish the job. She grabbed the automatic, pulled the pin on the dead soldier’s belt grenade and ran for the stairwell. 

The explosion knocked her forward off her feet and she rolled through the door, heat and fire washing over her back. 

That had worked better than anticipated. 

Not nicely at all. 

  


  


There was blood on her boots. She tracked it out onto the asphalt, to the three dead scientists at the cars. Men she didn’t know. More names for her collection. Of the soldiers, only the two shot from a distance were whole enough to be identifiable, and she stopped to collect ammunition but didn’t touch their gas masks. Kevin was three floors up and not her concern anymore, and neither were these men. 

_But what if-_

_No._ They’d made their bed and now they were in it, and it was no business of hers who they’d been before they’d chosen to try and kill her. 

The road led out from the parking lot and loading docks, through another big steel gate. If she could get it open, it ought to let her out into the desert. From there she could circle around outside the facility, reach the train yards and fortify a safe zone for other survivors. 

It was not open. It was locked, sealed, and blatted unhappily at all her passcodes. _Come on!_ She typed in every code she’d ever been given and nothing worked. She slammed her fist against it and it rang hollowly back. Distant gunfire flared, military locked in combat somewhere in the facility. _Let me out. I don’t want to keep doing this._

_Let me out!_

The door wasn’t going to open, and there was no way over the sheer stone and cement walls. 

Then something slammed into her back and her chin caught blacktop. The revolver clattered away. She rolled over, gasping, into the corner between the steel door and wall. Bullets kicked up rock chips and ricocheted past. 

Breathing hurt. She closed her eyes and made herself draw and hold five deep breaths. If the shooter hadn’t gotten her again yet, then she was safe until she moved. And she would need to move fast. 

The vest was compromised. Back panel would be useless now, wouldn’t stop a .22. The shooter was above her at a window; second story, but at a poor angle. The tip of the automatic waved up and down, raking bullets six inches to her right. 

Trapped. 

She crouched, back to the cement, shoulder to the steel door, and pressed her hands to her ears to shut out the gunfire. _Think._

_Wait for him to run out of ammunition? He’s probably got crates of it up there and is supposed to hold this gate in case something comes in._

_False surrender again? No, he doesn’t care, he just wants me dead._

_Grenade? Bad angle for a throw, and I only have one._

Whoever was up there was looking at the mass of bodies she’d left behind. They were mad, and they were hoping very much to kill her. She assumed male, but, she reasoned, it could very well be a woman on the trigger. Female marines were rare but they did happen. 

Didn’t change a thing. 

The bullets kicked up dust and shrapnel, peppering her cheek and shoulder with burning flecks. 

She pulled out her phone. Six texts from her mother. There were others, Amber confirming she’d got the message, folks from town wanting news, _is it aliens? Is it Russia?_ But she ignored them. 

Richards had reached her parents and explained what he could. Her mother was asking if Beth was alright, was still alive, was coming home. 

She texted back _“I’m alive. I’m trying to come home but-”_

She’d been about to write _I’m trapped._ Trapped against a big steel door that wouldn’t open. Alone, too much blood behind her. Blood on her boots, people she’d killed. Ears ringing from the grenade, back aching from shot. 

She looked up at the black streak of gun barrel, saw the muzzle flash in the shade. Hiding from the shooter, hoping he’d go away. Look someplace else, turn the gun on himself. But this wasn’t an angry broken stranger, this was a soldier doing his job. 

She had a job too. 

_“But there’s people I need to save.”_ She was a security guard, and the security of her people had been compromised. She wasn’t trapped, she was just momentarily held up. 

Go find Dr. Rosenberg. Save him, save as many as she could. Get them out and herself behind them, get them all past the military and the aliens. 

_I’m going to kill you,_ she thought, watching the gun barrel move. _One way or another._

_“I’ll come find you when this is over. Get out of town, do whatever Richards tells you. I love you both.”_

She put the phone away and stood, pressed to her corner of safety. The gun barrel was wedged against the window frame. The shooter couldn’t get a better angle, or she’d be dead already. That left her with a narrow track of safety to the far corner, and from there a likely path along the raw stone close to the building. She’d have to be quick- the shooter would only have to lean out the window to blow her head off, but that would expose him too. 

And if he did lean out, that’d be her best chance to shoot back. 

Or be shot. Her back twitched. 

_Can’t away run now._ She could survive a chest shot, probably. Maybe. Forced to face the danger head-on. 

She swallowed against the dryness in her throat and slid along the door to the far wall. Hugged it tight enough to leave an imprint of stone on her jaw. Inched across the stone, bullets whipping close enough to tug her clothing but she’d been right. The shooter couldn’t make the angle work. 

Then stone chipped just in front of her nose and she froze, eyes pressed tight shut against the spray of rock shards. She’d found the edge of the safe zone. 

The rust-colored rough native stone jutted out three feet into the shooter’s range of fire, and she’d have to get around it to get to the building’s wall. 

The automatic had unlimited bullets but not an unlimited magazine. The shooter had to pause the eject and insert clips. She just needed to control when that happened. 

Everyone hated the helmets because they looked stupid and felt like tin bucket, but everyone wore them because they protected against low-hanging pipes, fire sprinklers and explosive science experiments, and because they’d been developed on a military contract and were indestructible. 

The soldiers hadn’t wanted them; too ugly for the battlefield. 

She unbuckled the helmet and inched it up over the rock lip. 

The first bullet tore it out of her hands. The next dozen chased the rolling helmet across the dusty pavement, and then the shooting stopped. Either out of bullets, or just waiting for her next move. Heart in her throat, she bolted around the rock and raced for the cement wall. Bullets kicked at her heels. Grenade up, pin pulled- An easy, underhanded toss right up through the broken window. 

It blew, and glass and metal and something red and wet pattered down in the parking lot. 

Silence. 

She sat with her hands over her head, wedged between a stack of tires and a dumpster, and caught her breath. Then she went back across the parking lot and retrieved the revolver and her helmet. It was dented and chipped but whole. She texted Richards. _“The helmets really are bullet-proof.”_

_“Glad to hear you’re still alive. I’m taking your folks to your dad’s hunting cabin, someplace out behind the mines. We’ll circle back and meet you outside the gates. Do you have an exit plan?”_

_“I sure hope so. See you soon.”_

I sure hope so.


	15. Chapter 15

The shooter’s window was her best option for getting out of the dead-end parking lot and she’d paid for passage with a lot of bodies. At least she had an arsenal again: automatic and shotgun from the dead soldiers in addition to the revolver. She climbed the tire stack and got onto the dumpster and hauled herself in the window. The shooter had helpfully cleared the frame of broken glass but she couldn’t avoid what was left of the person, whoever they were. The hallway, with its checkered floor and bright posters, looked more like an elementary school than a research lab; the blood was just more colorful contrast. 

Records rooms, above-ground archives, halls lined with dented grey filing cabinets and walls full of motivational posters. This wouldn’t be sensitive research; more likely this was the HR division for the company truck drivers or something else equally pedestrian. There was more blood splatter, much more than her grenade had created, but no bodies. 

Down the hall a security office separated the records rooms from the shipping warehouses. 

Voices, sharp and militant. Radio static. _All hostiles eliminated._ Booted feet but muffled, several doors away. 

She stared at the red ring of biological matter on the wall above the desk. 

Shotgun blast. Close-range. Her hands felt icy cold. 

At least it would have been instantaneous. Her name had been Marsha Contos; she’d come to poker night once, a year ago. Good player but didn’t stick around. Had her own crowd and preferred different games, but friendly. 

Beth could picture her smile. 

She worked quickly and quietly, ears straining for the sound of hinges in case the squad came back. She added Marsha’s ID to the growing stack. It would also get her though any nearby security doors, in case her own clearance wasn’t high enough. She replaced her damaged vest with a new one from the security locker but there were no spare uniforms and the thought of taking Marsha’s was far worse than the thought of continuing on in what she had, wet, melted and bloody though it was. And she found ammunition. Shotgun, and plenty of it. 

Marsha had no eyes to close and Beth held back the desire to say something aloud in the empty room, anything, to acknowledge the woman’s death. Too dangerous, with the soldiers just outside. _But I will make them pay._

She would have to move soon. The footsteps were pacing, but growing softer. They were moving further into the warehouse. She just had to be patient. 

She crouched with her back to the wall behind the desk, beside Marsha’s body, and checked her phone. In amongst the constant stream of texts from friends and former coworkers was a number her phone didn’t know. 

_"Hello?"_

One word, sender unknown. She moved to delete the message then stopped. Someone in town might have given someone her number. _"Who is this?"_ she replied. 

_"Freeman. Dead mans phone sorry."_

He was alive. He was _alive._

_"Where are you? Are you alright? Stay put, I'll come for you."_

_"Am alright. HEV helping a lot. Military hostile, reason unknown. Unfamiliar organics hostile. Watch for parasites."_

_"Yeah I know. Do you know where you are?"_

_"Freight tram central control. Starting power."_

_"Didn't know we had one of those."_

_"Didn't know either. It is occupied. Must keep moving."_

_"Stay in contact."_

And then nothing. She stared at the phone for a long five minutes, ignored twenty-seven missed voice calls, answered six more update requests from folks in town, _yes aliens, hostile, no don't trust the military they're being bastards in here, get out of town if you can, stay away from the Mesa, but Freeman didn't text again._

The footsteps were gone, the radio traffic a muffled chatter. She checked the automatic; full clip, two more in reach. Now or never. It was _unlikely_ a soldier knew she was there and was waiting just on the other side, ready to shoot her as she turned the knob. Unlikely, but not impossible. Her mind filled in all the details of a crouched figure in mottled green fatigues, helmet and gas mask. Maybe even Kevin. Her body stiffened against anticipated impact. She went down on one knee, automatic braced against the vest as she turned the knob. 

The door, unoiled, neglected--building maintenance was _not_ Security’s job, no matter how much it was expected of them--squeaked on its rusted hinges and she flinched back, let go of the knob and swore as it swung shrieking open and banged on the cinderblock wall. 

Bullets scored the cement floor just inside. Pounding feet- more bullets, and the dark bulk of a soldier. She hugged the wall, still on one knee, and shot into the looming body. That one fell, and the one behind it, and then came a metallic thunk and clattering roll. 

She launched herself back around the corner and tripped over Marsha’s body as the grenade blew behind her. Cinderblock shrapnel stung her neck and arms and pinged off her helmet. She landed against the security cage fence, knees and one hand in cold blood. 

Her ears were still ringing from the grenade blast in the staircase and then the gunfire in the parking lot; now they hurt sharp and deafening. _Get up, get up, two more soldiers._ She swung the automatic up, pointed it in the right direction. Sure enough, one pursued around the corner. 

She shot at the movement; the soldier never saw her. 

Clip out. She slammed the next one in and slid around the end of the desk. The fourth soldier was yelling something into the radio but she couldn’t make out the words through the ringing. He leaned over the desk and she shot up, hot gun barrel against her chin, eyes tight shut and lips pressed together as what was left rained down warm over her helmet and shoulders. 

The body rolled off the desk and landed crossways over Marsha’s. 

She sneezed and rolled the soldier’s body off, for no real reason besides that it seemed improper to leave Marsha weighed down by her killer. 

The hall was clear but the smell of dead body was heavy in the air. Not quite the same as farmyard butchering, but similar lingering odor of stomach gas alongside the metallic tang of blood. She crossed the hall and checked the shipping supply room, hopeful but steeling herself for the worst. 

Bright safety posters and diagrams of shipping routes lined the walls, a sharp contrast to the four scientists dead behind a pile of boxes and an upturned table. They'd barricaded themselves as best they could, and by the lack of blood splatter above hip-height on the wall, had been shot while sitting or kneeling. 

Kevin had come this way. Had he been forced to participate in the execution, after arguing to spare her life, or had he not needed to be ordered, after leaving her tied to a chair to die? She sighed. The task of collecting IDs was becoming harder and harder, the stack of them in her pocket uncomfortably thick. A part of her wanted to just walk away, ignore these new deaths; strangers, distant from her. 

_No._ She made herself kneel at each body, closing eyes, checking pockets. Her hands were bloody again and she cleaned them on her trouser legs, because cleaning them on what little white lab-coat cloth was left to the dead men seemed as wrong as leaving the soldier sprawled across Marsha. 

  


The hall opened into the upper story of the shipping warehouse. Crates were stacked taller than she was on pallets, ready for loading into the freight containers below. Not all of them were Black Mesa; three had military stenciling, and one was helpfully full of grenades. They’d either started their incursion with massive supply lines already in place or Black Mesa had been in the process of shipping military hardware out. Neither possibility was a good thought. 

There was distinctly alien chatter emanating from one of the shipping crates. She decided against upturning someone else’s goldfish bowl and bypassed it; the next one was making more interesting noises. 

Human noises. Banging, hollering, calls for help. 

She set her shoulder under the heavy lever bar and heaved it up, and the door swung outward. 

A living scientist. He was an older man, not someone she’d met before. “You alright?” she asked. 

“Oh, thank you. I’d just about given up hope of rescue!” He stumbled to the container door and grabbed her hands, bloodstained though they were. “We’ve been in here for hours.” 

She held herself still, willing away the unease at having her hands encumbered. “I’m looking for Doctor Rosenberg. Do you know where he is?” 

“No, no, I’m sorry. When they first came through, they shoved us,” he waved vaguely towards the back of the container, “in here and locked the door. Said it was for our own protection, but I’m not sure I believe them anymore. Where did all the soldiers go?” 

She ignored his question. “Are you alone in here?” The smell of death seemed stuck in her nose and her ears were too damaged to pick up the sound of breathing. 

“I… I’m not sure. Doctor Kimberly might just be resting. But he might not be. I’m not very good at these things.” 

She gently detached the man and walked into the shadowed crate. Her flashlight showed white cloth, more red, and a body. Dead. “I’m sorry, he isn’t resting.” 

“I was afraid of that. At least he’s at peace.” 

At least one of them was. 

She sighed. “Alright. You should probably stay here until I come back for you. I don’t know where the rest of that squad went.” 

“You’re going to leave me in here?” His voice rose an octave. 

“With the door open. These walls will stop most gunfire. Keep your head down and be patient a little longer. I promise I’ll come back for you.” She sighed. “It’s my job to keep you safe, and as long as I’m alive I’ll keep doing it.” 

She was on dangerous ground, promising things she had no business promising. 

The loading dock doors were down and firmly locked but the shipping office seemed promising. If she could just clear a way—

\--Screeching, rusted hinges gave her warning and she scrambled back as the door swung open. No cover, just bare floor. She fired wildly with the automatic and was flung back. Her helmet clunked on cement and she wheezed, fighting stabbing pain in her chest for every breath. The gunfire was over so apparently she’d hit something. Or were they just walking up on her to finish the job at close range? 

She rolled over and looked. No, both dead. _Come on, breathe._ Wind knocked out at least, maybe broken ribs, bruised sternum. And then the stinging started. 

She’d taken two bullets to the chest plate and caught a spray of buckshot on her left shoulder, and it _hurt._ There was no way to breathe without pain. But she was upright, still alive, and seemed to not be in danger of bleeding out on the floor. 

_Come on, you’ve been through worse,_ she told herself. _Get up._ No enemies, for once. The parking lot had been worse. Rolling her neighbor’s ATV down a cliff and breaking three ribs and an ankle had been worse. _Yeah but I was fifteen years old and things didn’t hurt as bad back then._ She limped into the office and found a first-aid kit. Black Mesa’s magic healing boxes might go a lot further, for a cost, but apparently they didn’t put them out in the peripherals where any old delivery driver might stumble on them. 

Now her left shoulder really hurt. Blood ran down her arm and soaked into her sleeve. 

She limped back to the shipping container. 

“Oh no. I heard the gunfire. Are you alright?” the scientist asked. 

“Better than the other guys,” she said. “You’ll need to help me with this. I can’t reach.” 

She directed him through opening the kit up and finding tweezers and scissors and then getting the sleeve off, in minute little slow steps, because talking also hurt and because basic first-aid was as foreign to the physicist as physics was to her. But he got five buckshot balls out and got the shoulder slathered messily in antiseptic ointment and a bandage secured with a ridiculous volume of tape. 

Throughout all of it she kept thinking of the night in the ER with Freeman. 

He still hadn’t texted. _He had better be alright._

The scientist opted to stay in the container until she came back for him. Wise, but risky. She didn’t like leaving him alone beside a shipping crate of live aliens and a dead friend, but the alternative of him following her into potential combat was worse. 

He was staring at the blood on his hands, a mix of hers and of the soldiers she’d killed, when she left. 

  


The train yard door did not betray her. It opened smoothly, and she saw the first two soldiers before they saw her. They were standing at the end of the nearest freight car, talking. One had his mask up, cigarette lit. The other was on his phone. 

The vest was compromised. She’d flipped it around to present the back plates first, rendering it horrendously uncomfortable, and she had to fight both the pain and the awkward fit for breath. There would be no running in her near future. 

But she couldn’t pull the trigger. They were standing there _talking. Probably texting friends. Taking a break._

 _From murdering my friends and coworkers,_ she thought, but also, _and if I shoot them, what does that make me?_ Her fingers tightened on the revolver butt. She could make the shot, very easily. Kill one, probably the other before they figured out what was happening. More would be out there somewhere in the train yard maze. She didn’t want to die. 

_Since when did that justify shooting a stranger in the back._

_They started it!_

But they weren’t standing over the fresh bodies of her people; this was different. She couldn’t execute every soldier she saw on the grounds they’d probably been committing war crimes all day long. Maybe this group was out here because they hadn’t been inside. Someone had, after all, shoved the scientists in the train car instead of lining them up along the wall. 

_And maybe not every alien in the building wants to eat me._

She sighed. _I’m going to get myself killed._ But there was a line. A foolish stupid line. Her line. _I don’t want to die but I don’t want to regret living either._

“Hey! Drop your weapons!” she yelled. The soldier with the phone dropped it and put his hands up; the other one swung his automatic around on its shoulder strap and spat bullets at her. She squeezed the trigger and he fell. 

Three bullets punched through the door, inches from her face. Well, she’d found the rest of the squad. 

She dropped back and let the door slam closed, then hugged the wall on its hinge side. The soldiers were rushing the door. More bullets cut through it, hollow-core steel sheeting not a match for close-range automatic fire. But the walls were cinderblock, and so she waited until someone opened the door. 

The shotgun filled the gap with smoke and buckshot. More automatic-fire, and the door was nearly torn from its hinges. She shot both barrels into whoever tore it open and lurched forward as a grenade sailed past her. She rolled over the cement apron and fell four feet to the tar-black gravel beside the tracks. Her vision clouded with pain and she wheezed for breath; the soldiers were above her, and her unprotected back was to them. 

The grenade blew and someone grunted and fell. One of their own, caught too close to the blast. How many more? One? Two? She pushed herself off the gravel, eyes scanning, and saw a crouched soldier in the shadow of the next train car. A glint of heavy gasmask eye plates, or gun optics, or something- she shot before she was sure, and he fired back but the revolver was more accurate. 

A step on dry gravel. One more. She whirled and steadied herself on the cement apron, her vision swimming as she fought her injuries for oxygen. 

The first soldier, the one who had dropped his phone. Both hands still up, phone between his black boots. “Please don’t shoot,” he said, voice metallic and muffled through the heavy rubber. 

“Drop your weapons,” she hissed. “All of them.” She coughed and regretted it. She wasn’t in any fit state to get close enough to zip-tie the soldier. And she couldn’t shoot him now either. “Mask off.” 

He pulled it off; an unfamiliar face, young, dark skin, wide scared eyes. “I ain’t killed anyone today, I swear. Can I get my phone?” 

“No. Kick it over here.” He did, and it bounced along the gravel and stopped about half-way. Oh well, she wasn’t going to pick it up. 

“Are you Calhoun?” 

“Yeah. You know Kevin?” 

“Uh-huh. His squad got sent out to do gate duty over him not killing you.” 

“Twerp tied me to a chair and left me to get eaten by aliens,” she retorted. Talking hurt, but if they were talking they weren’t trying to kill each other. Yet. “What am I supposed to do with you?” she said, voicing her foremost thought. “Why are you all killing us anyway?” 

He shrugged, hands still up. “Beats me. Somethin’ about containing the incursion. Listen lady, I am not here for this shit. I appreciate you not putting a bullet through my head a minute ago; I got a family and I aim to get home so why don’t we just go our separate ways and pretend we never saw each other?” 

She sighed, coughed again and winced. Her arm was sore from holding the revolver level and there was a stinging mix of sweat and blood running into her eyes. The desert sun was bright, and her head was pounding. 

“What’s your name, kid?” 

“JJ Williams.” 

“Alright, JJ. You head off through the tracks, and you don’t look back. I got family too. I see you again, you point a gun at me, I will not hesitate. You understand?” 

“Yeah. I understand. You’re not going to shoot when I walk away?” 

“If I was going to shoot an unarmed kid, I’d have done it already.” She sighed. “Don’t make me regret this. Get going.” _Get out of here before I throw up or black out._

He nodded and backed away, then turned and ran down the darkened train tunnel alongside the cars. _He’ll probably get eaten by something._

_He’s got a better chance than Kevin gave me._

There was a dead security guard up on the apron, sprawled over a stack of crates. Beaten to death, strangled. No bullet wounds. His face was vaguely familiar but his badge and wallet were gone. “I’m sorry about this,” she said, as she stripped him of his vest and shirt. It was one size smaller than her uniform and would be uncomfortable against her wounded shoulder, but it would work. She glanced around, knowing no one was left alive in the train yard but still feeling suddenly exposed as she peeled off her ragged one-sleeved button-down and put the other one on. It stank of someone else’s sweat, some else’s fear. 

She put the compromised vest back on the body. Something at least, so as not to leave him half-naked. 

The military had brought supplies; in the corner where JJ and the first dead soldier had been standing she found a crate of medical kits with injectable antibiotics and painkillers, military-industrial-complex strength. 

With a little tiny Black Mesa stamp and insignia, in fine print under the proprietary technologies verbiage. 

She set the microneedle ring against her arm, following the diagram, and depressed the button. Just like an EpiPen, she thought, and closed her eyes as the painkillers took effect. Very pleasant sitting here in the warm sunshine, very nice. No gunfire nearby. No aliens. Someone she hadn’t had to kill. 

With effort, she sat up and fished her phone out. 

Freeman had texted back. 

_“Safe. For now. Command center cleared.”_

_“Ah, sounds just like my day. Give em hell for me. I’m at the train yard. Doctor Rosenberg may have a way out.”_

_“Good luck.”_

_“You’re coming too.”_

Silence. A tiny blank screen on her phone. _Come on._

 _“Don’t wait for me.”_

She pressed her fingers together and rested her forehead on them for a long moment, then replied. _“I’ll come back for you. It’s my job to keep you safe.”_

He didn’t respond. 


End file.
